[jrockway]

Let's say instead of linking to a site that allows you to download copyrighted material, we were talking about linking to a site that allowed you to order a hit on your wife/husband.

These sites don't need any special laws about linking: once law enforcement gets wind of them, they will be gone instantly. All an investigator needs to do is order a hit and then arrest the dude that shows up to execute it. That's the end of that business.

Copyright infringement is hard to enforce because it's peer-to-peer and can happen outside the US' jurisdiction (see TPB). This makes it hard to build a case against someone: uploading 10MB of a movie to someone on the swarm is hardly massive copyright infringement, and if they're outside of the US, you can't do anything anyway. So making linking illegal is their last hope: maybe people won't find the tracker sites and P2P will die.

Not bloodly likely. The links will just move out of the US too.

[edanm]

"These sites don't need any special laws about linking: once law enforcement gets wind of them, they will be gone instantly."

But you said it yourself in the next sentence - what if the sites are operating outside the United States, in a country over which the US has no control at all?

Let's say I can order a hit from a site in Country X, and the US can't stop the site. Should I be allowed to spread a link to that site around? In fact, if I were to tell someone the link and he went and ordered a hit, I'm pretty sure I could be jailed as an accomplice.

IANAL by any means - am I wrong? Would love a lawyer to weigh in here.

[jrockway]

Yes, you should be able to spread the link around. Hits happening outside of the US' jurisdiction is not the US' problem.

[edanm]

To clarify, I'm talking about hits happening in the US, but ordered from a website outside the US, over which the US has no jurisdiction, and therefore can't take down.

(Look at my other comment in this thread for another example).

[jrockway]

You should still be able to link to the site. Censorship is censorship.

If the site is outside of the US but is designed for people in the US to use, it's going to need to accept payment from people in the US. The way you make this site go away is by stopping the flow of money, not by telling people not to tell other people about it. The first way works. The second way does not.

To bring this back to P2P, the reason they can't go after the money is there is no money. That's what annoys the governments so much; people are trading movies for free. This makes it not-very-illegal and very hard to stop.