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Comment by tener | Hacker News Reader

Could it be it has suddently became illegal due to some novel interpretation of existing laws?

Could be, but it doesn't seem likely considering torrents themselves are not illegal, it's what they point to that might be illegal.

But then again, I wonder why trackers are seen as illegal? They're nothing more than what a router is.

Technological reality doesn't matter in law. What matters is whether you facilitate crime or not.

I agree, but the case with torrents and trackers is such a gray area. Shouldn't routers be illegal since they help facilitate crime? If not, why should trackers?

I'm just playing with thoughts, interested in seeing what people think.

This question was actually addressed in the EU copyright directive:

Article 5

Exceptions and limitations

1. Temporary acts of reproduction referred to in Article 2, which are transient or incidental [and] an integral and essential part of a technological process and whose sole purpose is to enable:

(a) a transmission in a network between third parties by an intermediary, or

(b) a lawful use

of a work or other subject-matter to be made, and which have no independent economic significance, shall be exempted from the reproduction right provided for in Article 2.

.. explicitly exempts the copies made by routers in the course of their operation.

Trackers in general aren't illegal. You can host a tracker with legal content. You can't host a tracker that serves up zero say scene releases. Just like a router in a sever farm that serves cp is part of an illegal operation.

There is a gray area where you'd host a tracker that serves legal content but some copyrighted material gets through. The DMCA safe harbor should take of that. But most of these torrent frackers are so obviously designed to host pirated stuff that dmca won't cover them.

More cynically put; what matters is if you are perceived as a facilitator of copyright infringement and a threat to the business models of corporations willing to spend a lot of money on shutting you down.

Regardless of whether what Torrentz was doing legal or not; what you do doesn't even have to be actually illegal to be shut down if your opponent has bigger pockets.

Much like gun manufacturers and bullet makers should be charged with facilitating murder.

Intent matters. The vast majority of people that buy a gun do not murder people. The vast majority of people that download iron_man.torrent only intend to do one thing with it.

If intent matters, then guns are doubly problematic. They are specifically designed to kill people. They have no other use or purpose.

You could kill animals with them or do target practice with live rounds.

Killing people is not illegal, the circumstances matter.

Neither is downloading content, the circumstances(whether it is copyrighted or not, whether you have a license, etc) matter.

What about defending yourself against a bear while camping?

Is that not okay?

I suspect the poster's only experience with guns is their portrayal in the media. Spending more than 10 minutes in a mountain town in the US would make you quickly realize how many people have guns with no intent to use them on people.

That's completely false. I own multiple guns for target shooting and hunting and have no intent on ever using them to shoot at people. I don't even keep them in a convenient location to use for self defense.

I just believe that there is a bigger discussion to be had with we mean with facilitating. There is an attempt by the copyright industry to expand and stretch the definition of "facilitation" to those who don't have the intent. Much like the whole gun discussion...

Maybe they ran out of sufficient advertisers with low enough morals to advertise on their site? Torrent sites are full of the worse ads and abusive javascript.

This seems to be happening since the Popcorn Time days. The projects get shut down and nobody ever knows why and how it happened. Quite strange indeed. They may have figured out how to threaten these guys effectively.

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