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On The Legality Of Tracking BitTorrent Files
from the search-engine-or-criminal-mastermind? dept
A few months back, when the MPAA started going after BitTorrent trackers, some people wondered if those trackers were really doing anything illegal. After all, they weren't hosting any of the unauthorized content. If anything, they were more similar to a specialized search engine, that only found torrent files -- not all of which had to be unauthorized. It appears that the guy who hosted one torrent tracking site is now hoping to use this defense against Hollywood, after receiving a lawsuit from the MPAA (in the UK, despite the charges being in the US). It's a tricky question. Realistically, there are similarities with search engines -- but that hasn't stopped the entertainment industry in the past, and it certainly didn't help the original Napster, who basically made the same argument. While the guy in this article claims he should have the same protections as Grokster, he's missing the one important fact. Grokster got away (so far...) because it didn't have a centralized directory of files that it controlled. That's the only thing many of these torrent tracker sites have. Still, it's only a matter of time until someone writes an interface for Google to just search out torrent files. Then, Google basically becomes a torrent tracking site as well. Will the entertainment industry go after Google too?
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No Subject Given
This already happened:
http://www.lifehacker.com/software/search-engines/search-google-by-file-extension-031675.ph p
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yep
for example, try:
filetype:torrent britney
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" Will the entertainment industry go after Google too?"
No they will go after the tracker sites that google finds in the search. In fact the entertainment industry will probably USE google to find the sites that they want to sue.
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Trackers vs. Tracker-Sites
Also the question is: Is it important (in legal terms) to differentiate between actual Trackers and Tracker Sites. Trackers being the Central-Server for a specfific torrent, to which the Client-Software repeatedly connects and communicates, and a Tracker-Site being a website that allows uploads or just plain linking of/to the torrents (the small files).
There are several layers of indirection - when does it get illegal? Oviously a nebulous hint that certain content is available at an unnamed popular Torrent-Network is not yet illegal (I assume - or is it?) - so how specific can you get?
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You can already do this on Google by typing filetype:torrent.
Bram Cohen is working on torrent search too: http://redherring.com/Article.aspx?a=11346&hed=Harnessing+BitTorrent%e2%80%99s+Storm
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torrent tracking
ummmmmmmmmm.....GOOGLE> FILETYPE:.TORRENT ....
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