[lelandbatey]

The thing is that to download a torrent, the absolute minimum amount of information you need is the torrent hash. The torrent hash is on the order of ~40 characters long, requiring no other information. All you have to do is paste that short sting into a torrent client to download a set of files.

Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share? If I paste the hash for the latest blockbuster in this comment, can legal action be taken against me?

[roel_v]

It's sad that I have to beat that tired old drum again, but in law, intent matters (yes I have a law degree but I think it's fair to say that one doesn't need one to know that). After 15 years I should have been desensitized by farcically naive 'reasoning' (or I should say, farcically naive sophistry, because let's face it, that's what it is) like 'they don't post torrents, the users do' and 'how can a small string be illegal' but it still annoys me.

At the risk of going down the shitty analogy path, let's consider 'How can putting just a tiny bit of lead into somebody's head be illegal? It's only 115 grain! I mean, of course, putting 500 grain into somebody would be illegal, but if I put only 115 grain of lead into somebody, can legal action be taken against me?' Really?

[TheOtherHobbes]

Maybe a better analogy would be hiring a hall for a music copiers swap meet and charging advertisers for wall space around the hall?

Now, as crimes go I happen to think TPB are far less guilty of offences against humanity than - say - the bankers who cause the 2008 meltdown, or the torturers at the CIA.

And it's also debatable just how many sales of mainstream CDs are lost due to piracy.

But I know a couple of small music software/plugin devs who shut up shop because piracy killed their revenue stream, and it just wasn't worth their time any more.

So it's counterfactual for the supporters to pretend there are no negative consequences to file sharing, and it's all about heroically sticking it to The Man.

It really isn't.

[clarry]

> piracy killed their revenue stream

I hear about things like this every once in a while, but where's the proof?

[musername]

there are far more musical plug-ins than one would ever need. I see no loss.

[FeepingCreature]

As a layman, I think this is the real problem: the law assumes that people are smart and tools are stupid. However, computer programs like torrent clients have become frighteningly smart about efficiently turning scarce information (like a short hash) into illegal actions. Imagine a GPS unit that could turn "don't go downtown, there's a strong mob presence" into a route to the nearest drug dealer.

Most of the "intent" of going from a hash to a download is in the torrent client. It's a smart tool. But to my best knowledge, the law assumes that intent has to happen in a human. If you have two humans, and both have weak criminal intent, but they're connected by a program that makes illegal acts very easy, I don't know how the law judges that. Probably badly.

[nickthemagicman]

Intent is subjective as hell. I cant believe you have a law degree and dont realize this.

Every story has a million differnet sides.

It seems like thats the lawyers JOB to prove varying degrees of intent.

Was their 'intent' to merely share magnet links in an open forum or was it to destroy copyright protections,ruin the entertainment industry, and starve all artists to death.

Did I put 115 grain in your head by accident or was I intentionally trying to murder you? (Ie accidental manslaughter vs 1st degree)

Intent does matter and the client with the smaller pockets usually has the worst intentions.

[brute]

What Colour are your bits? [1] This rather poular article really opened my eyes. Basically the same bits can be both, illegal and legal, at the same time, depending on the method you used to derive them. I still think it's stupid but it gave me a better understanding of the reasoning behind certain court decisions.

[1] http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23

[FeepingCreature]

This is the color of my bits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Free-speech-flag.svg

Note: picture is illegal.

[jarek]

Picture is only illegal if you display it and say "I support freedom" with a wink. Don't wink and there'll be no intent. Obvs.

[titanomachy]

True, I'm tired of the old "ones and zeros" argument. If all you did was punch some numbers into a phone and speak a name, it's still conspiracy to commit murder (or whatever, IANAL) if you are calling a hitman. If you flash your headlights to warn thieves that the police are coming, you're still an accomplice. Surely it can't be illegal to flash my headlights?? Well, yeah it is, in this case. And if I share a hash key which tells people where to find child porn, well that's illegal too.

[mc808]

That's a terrible analogy. Try: "Yes, making meth is illegal. Yes, selling meth-lab kits is illegal. Okay, maybe publishing instructions for building a meth lab is illegal. Wait, linking to someone else's instructions is illegal? And now you're telling me that sharing a short hash that validates someone else's link to someone else's instructions is also illegal?" (Is it even illegal in the meth lab scenario?)

[roel_v]

Why, yes, of course. Or are you saying that as long as there are enough indirections and 'wink wink nudge nudge', anything is legal? So I'm a drug runner and it's illegal for me to take your money and point you to the guy at the other side of the street who has your stuff, but it's OK when I give you a piece of paper with a map to a rock under which is another paper with a phone nr which you need to call that will then tell you to walk to the other side of the street?

Or let's say I'm an electrician who wires indoor marihuana plantations. That is illegal. Do you think it would be OK to stand next to some other guy and tell him what switch to connect to which socket and which tools to use to strip the wire? 'Oh your honor I was just distributing instructions on how to build a plantation, not doing it!'. You might want to prepare your diddly hole when you rely on such argumentation as a legal defense.

Again: INTENT MATTERS. When something is done with enough proximity to actual illegal actions, that 'something' is quite likely also illegal and punishable. Which is why Uncle Fester is a free man and Kim Dotcom isn't (well only barely).

[vacri]

In your analogy, TPB acts as the middleman, hooking the user up with the supplier. Yes, when it comes to meth, that's illegal.

[mc808]

I was referring to the example of publishing a hash code for a torrent. So it's like saying "Someone told me that there is a drug dealer (haven't verified this myself) where if you add up the GPS coordinates of his house, divide by 317 and take the remainder, the result will be 42."

It's not at all obvious that saying "42" (with the other operations unstated) is or should be illegal speech, and it's by no means comparable to putting a small bullet into somebody.

[vacri]

I don't know about you, but when I go to TPB, I'm not greeted with a bunch of pages with nothing but simple low numbers. I'm greeted by a search engine, which shows me great lists of things by TV show name (for example), which I can click on and get taken to a page where someone describes what's on offer with this 'number', and other people comment on the quality. I can get the torrent hash, and also instructions on what to do with it. It's generally not something that needs to be verified very often, either.

And in any case, if someone says "hey, where can I get meth", and you say "42, just deconstruct the number with this algorithm", you've done the same thing as just handing over a phone number - you've facilitated the contact.

[MichaelGG]

It's actually illegal to share instructions on how to make "controlled" substances? That sounds utterly abhorrent.

[vacri]

If it was instructions on how to make a movie, I don't think anyone would have a problem. But it's instructions on where to get illegal goods. It's not like the receiver is going through a recipe themselves like they're baking a cake.

Don't get me wrong; I torrent tv shows and the like. But what I find silly is the way people are trying to boil the intent and action away from torrenting, spin-doctoring it to sound as innocent as possible.

[upofadown]

I don't think that the post you were responding to was really arguing that the size of the hash was the significant factor for legality. It was instead pointing out that treating the distribution of such short hashes as illegal is absurd. There is nothing to prevent a government from making laws against, say, the distribution of bomb making information. Governments have done so. Such laws are still absurd in a world where there is no practical way to limit the distribution of such ideas. A government might just as well make a law against the darkness that occurs after the sun goes down.

[paublyrne]

>Such laws are still absurd in a world where there is no practical way to limit the distribution of such ideas.

We keep child pornography illegal, and indeed take measures to limit its distribution. It isn't clear that laws are necessarily absurd because of the difficulty of their enforcement.

The absurdity of a law might be better measured based by the effects of the thing the law prohibits on society or individuals.

[roel_v]

I'm not sure what you're arguing. Is it that IP protection laws are immoral, or that they're impractical? GP was making a moral argument (I think), you seem to be making a practical one.

So assuming that you are making a practical argument: should there be no laws that are hard to enforce? Let's take domestic abuse, or child abuse. Hard to detect, even harder to prosecute because there is usually little physical evidence. So should we just throw our hands in the air and go home?

"Such laws are still absurd in a world where there is no practical way to limit the distribution of such ideas."

Well a largish number of raids over the last years on sites hosting torrents, causing these sites to disappear, would say that you're wrong. Sure, it's hard to completely restrict all illegal distribution. That's not even a practical goal. But with TPB down, it's become quite a bit more difficult to find illegal content for people who are occasional torrenters (i.e. not people who are members of private sites, or who use IRC - a tiny subset of all people).

People have been saying for years 'you can't shut down the torrent sites!'. Well there aren't a whole lot of them left, are there? So it does seem that IP law enforcement isn't as impossible as you claim it to be.

[icebraining]

People have been saying for years 'you can't shut down the torrent sites!'. Well there aren't a whole lot of them left, are there?

Yes. Yes there are. Not to mention hundreds of sites (especially forums) where torrent files and magnet links are distributed.

[JackC]

> Are we really going to say that these 40 character strings are illegal to share?

Yeah, it's not unusual for short messages containing numbers to be illegal. Like:

"The guy at 42 Foo St. is looking to sell a kilo of coke if anyone's interested."

or

"Everyone show up at the mall at 11PM exactly, grab something, and run. They can't catch us all!"[1]

or

"Thank you for your payment to personaldeetz.com! Bill Jones has the social security number 001-23-4567 and the date of birth 1/2/34 and the bank account number ..."

There's nothing illegal about any of the numbers involved here, including the hash of the latest blockbuster. But there can certainly be something illegal about conveying information (in whatever encoding) that's intended to help someone commit a crime. Proving intent is the fun part.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob#Crime

[sysk]

I understand that magnet links might make a difference legally. What I meant is that switching to magnet links instead of torrent files is not what I would consider a big technical achievement (TPB didn't actually invent the magnet URI scheme, they simply adopted it). My main point being that I agree with Peter Sunde, TPB hasn't changed much in 8 years. Here's TPB in 2006: https://web.archive.org/web/20061007080151/http://thepirateb...

[majani]

You're pointing a thief in the right direction under no duress whatsoever. If a similar situation was replicated with physical goods there would be no question that you would be on the wrong. You're trying to fuzz up the situation using technicalities.

[amelius]

If you wrote down the number Pi in hexadecimal, I conjecture that any possible 40-digit sequence would appear in there somewhere.

Indeed, how could it possibly be illegal to share pieces of Pi? :)

[musername]

because information without conext is useless?

[towelguy]

So someone shares the sequence without any context and someone else grabs it and conjectures the context themselves.

What if they share positional information from a known sequence: pi[3000:3040].

[musername]

you said yourself the sequence was insignificant, so i assume it would be hard to infere any context. either way, on tpb there is context. A pointer into pi is just a minor difference in encoding. As said in another comment, intent matters - as much as I dislike the pressumptions made about the intent. Law philosophically, for lack of better words, difficult questions of morallity arise and are indeed significant. That includes conciousness about the consequences, which is why this topic is debated at length, because everyone has a stake in it. That's a lot of context.

OTOH assume knlowedge of nothing but the magnet link list torrent file, if you just downloaded the linked torrent files without to procede to download when in doubt about copyright infringement, that woould not be careless.

Your argument extends to how can any string of data be illegal, putting copyright into question, but that's a different debate.