[ornornor]

That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for.

Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.

[creativenolo]

I didn’t know this but would like to know more. Can you expand on how they try to circumvent linking and do they circumvent it?

It is surprising to hear because as a user they _seem_ like a link. Copy the link into something and get the (illegal) files.

[defrost]

Magnet linking is rather like standing on a street corner and regularly yelling "have you got any cannabis"?

Here's a random RARBG magnet link that may or may not work

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:468043aa374080fed5ff65e4cd8d4fed002986b5&dn=Rizzoli.And.Isles.S05.1080p.WEBRip.x265-RARBG

It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names)

What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it.

When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled.

Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).

[creativenolo]

Great description - thanks.

I wonder if they ‘stand up in court’ and/or have ever been tested too.

[sushibowl]

A magnet URI is a little bit like a web link in the sense that it refers to a particular piece of data, but it doesn't point to any particular host or location. It is merely a hash of the files it describes. So in other words, the link doesn't tell you where the particular content can be found, it only tells you what the content is that it refers to.

To actually find the content in question you take the link, go on a peer to peer network, and basically ask machines if they have the content in question available or know where it is. There's various ways to do that, in some cases your torrent app might know the location of some centralized "tracker" servers, and ask those servers whether they know locations for those files. Some torrents are "trackerless" and use a DHT, a type of distributed database that keeps information about where to find files.