[dane-pgp]

Which leads to possibly an interesting legal question: If a third-party is vouching for the quality of a given copyright-infringing torrent, are they liable for the copyright-infringement of the people who download that torrent based on its positive rating?

Some jurisdictions have decided that running a search engine for torrents (especially if it doesn't remove results which rights holders claim are leading to copyright infringement) does make the site operator liable.

I suppose if we are being strict, what we are talking about is vouching for the quality of a .torrent metadata file, which can be downloaded by a torrent client without legal problems from the author of that metadata, and it's only when the metadata is used to download the torrent contents that copyright infringement occurs.

The thought experiment I've considered is what would happen if there were a site where people could vote on short hex sequences of a certain length, to decide which sequences are the best. It could be called the "I Rate Bay", because users give each (hash) sequence a rating from 1 to 10.

Of course all of this ignores the fact that by participating in these ratings, someone is probably incriminating themselves by saying they have not only downloaded the torrent contents but read/installed/watched/listened to it. Using that as the basis of a case against someone seems almost reasonable, but pursuing a "contributory infringement" angle strays a little too far into freedom-of-speech violating territory, in my opinion.

[teeray]

I think there’s an argument to be made that if “quality” is limited in scope to “not malware,” then you’re operating a service to promote the public health of the Internet. If you start talking about whether the torrents are good rips, complete, etc., then it would promote more piracy. Not sure that this argument would pass muster given the history in this space, but I do think it would help stifle a malware propagation channel.

[pwg]

The article "What Colour are your bits?" has meaning here.

https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

[mindslight]

It's an interesting thought experiment. But even if you figure out a way to remain on the right side of the law today, the copyright cartels will just buy some new laws to make whatever they don't like illegal. The only way to stop this corruption is to thoroughly defund them.