- You often had to scan through the comments for a clickable IMDB link.
- Movie meta data was manually entered by uploaders who didn't really bother with it most of the time.
- Titles contained a bunch of metadata which shouldn't have been part of the title (e.g. encoding, source, quality, uploader name, etc.).
- There was sometimes an extra comment page that was empty.
- No moderation whatsoever in the comments. Impossible to find the interesting/useful comments without reading all of them one by one.
- A bunch of annoying ads (one of the download buttons was an ad if I recall correctly).
There's a recurring meme on HN that all UIs are automatically good if they are old/non-trendy.
Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share? If I paste the hash for the latest blockbuster in this comment, can legal action be taken against me?
At the risk of going down the shitty analogy path, let's consider 'How can putting just a tiny bit of lead into somebody's head be illegal? It's only 115 grain! I mean, of course, putting 500 grain into somebody would be illegal, but if I put only 115 grain of lead into somebody, can legal action be taken against me?' Really?
Or let's say I'm an electrician who wires indoor marihuana plantations. That is illegal. Do you think it would be OK to stand next to some other guy and tell him what switch to connect to which socket and which tools to use to strip the wire? 'Oh your honor I was just distributing instructions on how to build a plantation, not doing it!'. You might want to prepare your diddly hole when you rely on such argumentation as a legal defense.
Again: INTENT MATTERS. When something is done with enough proximity to actual illegal actions, that 'something' is quite likely also illegal and punishable. Which is why Uncle Fester is a free man and Kim Dotcom isn't (well only barely).
Don't get me wrong; I torrent tv shows and the like. But what I find silly is the way people are trying to boil the intent and action away from torrenting, spin-doctoring it to sound as innocent as possible.
It's not at all obvious that saying "42" (with the other operations unstated) is or should be illegal speech, and it's by no means comparable to putting a small bullet into somebody.
And in any case, if someone says "hey, where can I get meth", and you say "42, just deconstruct the number with this algorithm", you've done the same thing as just handing over a phone number - you've facilitated the contact.
Note: picture is illegal.
Most of the "intent" of going from a hash to a download is in the torrent client. It's a smart tool. But to my best knowledge, the law assumes that intent has to happen in a human. If you have two humans, and both have weak criminal intent, but they're connected by a program that makes illegal acts very easy, I don't know how the law judges that. Probably badly.
Now, as crimes go I happen to think TPB are far less guilty of offences against humanity than - say - the bankers who cause the 2008 meltdown, or the torturers at the CIA.
And it's also debatable just how many sales of mainstream CDs are lost due to piracy.
But I know a couple of small music software/plugin devs who shut up shop because piracy killed their revenue stream, and it just wasn't worth their time any more.
So it's counterfactual for the supporters to pretend there are no negative consequences to file sharing, and it's all about heroically sticking it to The Man.
It really isn't.
I hear about things like this every once in a while, but where's the proof?
So assuming that you are making a practical argument: should there be no laws that are hard to enforce? Let's take domestic abuse, or child abuse. Hard to detect, even harder to prosecute because there is usually little physical evidence. So should we just throw our hands in the air and go home?
"Such laws are still absurd in a world where there is no practical way to limit the distribution of such ideas."
Well a largish number of raids over the last years on sites hosting torrents, causing these sites to disappear, would say that you're wrong. Sure, it's hard to completely restrict all illegal distribution. That's not even a practical goal. But with TPB down, it's become quite a bit more difficult to find illegal content for people who are occasional torrenters (i.e. not people who are members of private sites, or who use IRC - a tiny subset of all people).
People have been saying for years 'you can't shut down the torrent sites!'. Well there aren't a whole lot of them left, are there? So it does seem that IP law enforcement isn't as impossible as you claim it to be.
Yes. Yes there are. Not to mention hundreds of sites (especially forums) where torrent files and magnet links are distributed.
We keep child pornography illegal, and indeed take measures to limit its distribution. It isn't clear that laws are necessarily absurd because of the difficulty of their enforcement.
The absurdity of a law might be better measured based by the effects of the thing the law prohibits on society or individuals.
Every story has a million differnet sides.
It seems like thats the lawyers JOB to prove varying degrees of intent.
Was their 'intent' to merely share magnet links in an open forum or was it to destroy copyright protections,ruin the entertainment industry, and starve all artists to death.
Did I put 115 grain in your head by accident or was I intentionally trying to murder you? (Ie accidental manslaughter vs 1st degree)
Intent does matter and the client with the smaller pockets usually has the worst intentions.
Indeed, how could it possibly be illegal to share pieces of Pi? :)
What if they share positional information from a known sequence: pi[3000:3040].
OTOH assume knlowedge of nothing but the magnet link list torrent file, if you just downloaded the linked torrent files without to procede to download when in doubt about copyright infringement, that woould not be careless.
Your argument extends to how can any string of data be illegal, putting copyright into question, but that's a different debate.
Yeah, it's not unusual for short messages containing numbers to be illegal. Like:
"The guy at 42 Foo St. is looking to sell a kilo of coke if anyone's interested."
or
"Everyone show up at the mall at 11PM exactly, grab something, and run. They can't catch us all!"[1]
or
"Thank you for your payment to personaldeetz.com! Bill Jones has the social security number 001-23-4567 and the date of birth 1/2/34 and the bank account number ..."
There's nothing illegal about any of the numbers involved here, including the hash of the latest blockbuster. But there can certainly be something illegal about conveying information (in whatever encoding) that's intended to help someone commit a crime. Proving intent is the fun part.
Magnet links are just a short string of text so one who does isn't hosting anything as far as I'm concerned. That isn't the law apparently.
If you mean all the 'thepiratebay' domains, I think you are mistaken. This one works for me:
haven't tried any else yet
If the page loads that doesn't mean it works correctly.
From the technical side of showing the torrent/magnet links on the TPB page, it's indeed a minor difference.