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Comment by d0mine | Hacker News Reader

In fact, the only person to present such evidence was defendant Peter Sunde, who claimed that a survey of his own showed that 80 percent of the 1,000 .torrent files he examined appeared to point toward material that was legal to distribute. </quote>

Do you know a source that provides different data?

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http://thepiratebay.org/top/all

Assuming all of that material is in fact illegal to distribute in that jurisdiction (I have no idea about their copyright laws) that still says nothing about what percentage of the overall torrents are illegal material, just that the illegal torrents are far more popular.

This doesn't matter though. If the majority/all of the most popular torrents on that site are illegal then the most popular use of the site is for illegal torrents. If most of their users go there to download illegal torrents, then that is the actual function of the site -- to share illegal downloads. It doesn't matter if that was originally intended to be so or not.

And if most of the bandwidth consumed "on the Internet" is used to transfer these illegal files, what is the actual function of ISPs/the Internet?

Ah, but you're not countering my argument. I'm not counting bandwidth -- I'm counting people. If most people on the Internet spent their time downloading files illegally then sure, that would be the main usage of the Internet.

On the recent page at this moment (http://thepiratebay.org/recent) , 90% of the torrents are of copyrighted content not being distributed by the rights holders. Two of the legal ones, I believe, are the porn picture sets. They are used to promote pay porn content and I will give the uploader the benefit of the doubt here. The other one is someone's collection of recipe for Indian food. I'm similarly assuming that his collection of recipes is not copyrighted, but 15.9MB of recipes is a lot of personal recipes.

Look: I am not in favor of the current system of IP. I think it is ridiculous to artificially add some constraint of scarcity when the marginal cost of duplication has fallen to zero. But we're reasonable here, we're not in court. We don't need to defend TPB using legalistic arguments. We can just be happy that a group of high powered lawyers turned out to be completely incompetent.

What is the percentage of torrents that point to materials illegal to distribute? (it is not a rhetorical question, a justified guess would suffice)

Otherwise, my answer is:

  - http://google.com 
  - http://news.ycombinator.com (enable showdead in the profile)

If a pawn shop in my neighborhood carried 80% legally sold items, and 20% stolen items, there'd be zero doubt that the owner was intentionally acting as a fence, and was helping create the demand that was causing local burglaries.

20% stolen content is HUGE.

The Pirate Bay is not literally holding 'stolen items'. They are merely providing a roadway to them. The analogy would be a person who gives directions to pawn shops. Giving directions isn't illegal, right? However, I don't know about the rules for crime by association in Sweden.

> 20% stolen content is HUGE.

What are you comparing it to?

I do not know the Swedish law either, but let's take it to an extreme:

If someone were to run a site called Assassin Bay, where clients could post .target files specifying jobs and hit men could accept those jobs, I'm sure that the site would be taken down within hours and the site owner would go to prison. Even in Sweden.

EDIT: To allow for the possibility that the Assassin Bay also has legal traffic, replace .target with .ad files. Then assume generously that advertisements for legal jobs make for 80% of the traffic and 20% are hits. The argument I made would still hold.

I think a much better analogy would be if someone were to run a site called "Craig's List," and had a section devoted to 'personals.' Would the webmaster be _legally_ responsible for those using that service for prostitution?

(again, not the site's moral responsibility to itself [craigslist cracks down on this sort of thing], but to the point of being able to arrest and imprison craigslist webmasters.)

If a site has been running for several years and a substantial portion of the ads are illegal and during all that time the site admins have repeatedly refused to remove illegal ads, then yes, the site admins have some responsibility.

I see your point.

However, I reworded the comparison a bit and some things don't look right even though they are.

  Pirate Bay       : Assasin Bay
  Legal .torrent   : .ad
  Illegal .torrent : .target
  Illegal Download : Loss of Life
  
  Property         : Life

The last analogy seems a bit inhumane. Then again,

> let's take it to an extreme

Thanks for seeing the point, which was that beyond a certain stage a website should not be able to maintain an "impartial" stance.

Your list will not look shocking any more if you add a line for the respective sentences:

Pirate bay : Assassin Bay

slap on the wrist : 15 years (1)

(1) if the admins provably and repeatedly have refused to remove .target files.

No, that's wrong. It <i>feels</i> the same if I click on a .torrent or if I download from iTunes. Either way I started a download and have a new album within the half hour.

The analogy would be if the pawn shop had transporters that weren't accurate enough to build a new copy from one location in a warehouse somewhere, so it had to make many copies from warehouses around the US, combining them all into a single coherent and accurate copy.

err, something like that. I'm not saying the Pirate Bay should be illegal, just that the pirate bay <i>is</i> called The Pirate Bay. I expect it is more than 20%, by data or .torrents. That is to say, I don't like incorrect analogies.

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