It will likely be clear when someone intended information to be a distributive mechanism for copyrighted or sensitive content. Naturally, there must be cap put on such hijinx. What about π, an irrational number calculable by anybody that contains that series of integers if you look long enough? What about an image file that has three pixels of black, then five pixels of white, then two pixels of red, and so on? Is that pattern a violation? What if I think it’s beautiful and I put it on the wall, and have no idea it’s actually a visual representation of a hash of a hash of a torrent containing a compressed file containing the hashes of files that act as pointers to copyrighted information? Is that series of integers a copyright violation? But there’s just as much absurd ammo on the other side as well.Ĭonsider the magnet identifier for this meta-torrent (or the DeCSS code, or a secure piece of electronics’ “master key,” or the like). It doesn’t matter how many steps you take, if your destination is copyrighted, then you’re in trouble. That’s absurd, of course, yet like many absurd things, it makes a certain amount of sense. What about a link to a link to a link? You can’t fool me, young man, it’s copyright violations all the way down. That’s a link to a link to a file that lets you download the file.

And linking to a link is a crime (as we’ve seen in Twitter DMCA takedowns). Yes, linking to copyrighted content is a crime.

It’s more a philosophical question than a technical one, which is why folks like the MPAA and RIAA will always be able to stay on one side of it. In a way, this torrent file, or indeed its magnet identifier (938802790a385c49307f34cca4c30f80b03df59c), contains millions or billions of dollars worth of pirated content. That is to say, it is a list of the unique identifiers, cryptographic hashes, of every. Pirate Bay (.se) user allisfine just recently uploaded a torrent to the site that is a collection of all the magnet identifiers for the entire site (actually, only about a quarter of the site, but all the publicly visible ones).

Torrents Hacker Experience