[gpm]

He did not choose the domain name by chance. He chose it because he observed it was previously in use as a tracker for copyright infringing torrents.

The police/courts/jury is not obliged to put blinders on just because you would prefer if they did.

The mere fact that the domain name was previously used for this is almost certainly probable cause to get search warrants that will almost certainly provide the requisite proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he has in fact intentionally both committed himself, and aided others in committing (because he knew what the domain name was, or at least recognized it as similar to demonoid and could guess), copyright infringement. And that's without the blog post... (which I assume in the hypothetical where he chose to keep running this he would not have posted).

[necovek]

They explicitly used it to download "Linux isos", which are highly likely not copyright infringing (they are usually free to distribute).

Eg. Canonical distributes Ubuntu via BitTorrent too: https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads

Edit: I missed the "uh," in the OP: I stand corrected.

[notpushkin]

They explicitly used it to “download ‘Linux isos’”, indeed!

But yeah, I don’t think Canonical would use open.demonii.si as a tracker for their torrents.

[immibis]

They wrote "download Linux ISO"s" yet they're using an old piracy tracker domain, which Linux ISOs don't use. The court is not stupid.

[ranger_danger]

For the purposes of a criminal case, yes, they are intentionally stupid... it's up to the prosecution to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that something they did was illegal and that they knew it and chose to do it anyway. What a judge/jury thinks about this person, or "linux ISOs", is irrelevant... their job is only to interpret the information given to them.

[immibis]

There is no reasonable doubt that the domain used is for piracy and the defendant knew as much.

"Beyond a reasonable doubt" doesn't mean you can just say "no that's not true" about anything and have it not count. It's beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond any doubt. It's not reasonable that this tracker address was gotten from a Linux ISO. Perhaps the defendant could claim they got it from a list of trackers, but they already admitted they didn't, so that's not reasonable either.

[ranger_danger]

> There is no reasonable doubt that the domain used is for piracy and the defendant knew as much.

Even if that were proven as true, so what? There's nothing illegal about using the domain itself.

> It's not reasonable that this tracker address was gotten from a Linux ISO

Sorry but you don't get to be the judge of that, the judge does.