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Comment by techthroway443 | Hacker News Reader

I'm failing to see the connection between magnet links to download copyrighted material and searching for an ISBN.

Magnet links are basically just deterministically computed ISBNs for arbitrary data.

Here is the magnet link for a zero length file.

    magnet:?xt=urn:ed2k:31D6CFE0D16AE931B73C59D7E0C089C0&xl=0&dn=zero_len.fil

How is that different than:

    978-0262510875 "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs - 2nd Edition"

ISBN numbers have identified copyrighted works since 1967.