In case #1, was sued by a Vancouver businessman named Wayne Crookes who claimed by publishing links to things he didn’t like, I was also effectively publishing what the kinks linked to, if you see what I mean, in the process, defaming him.

BC Supreme Court judge Stephen Kelleher ruled in my favour and, “This is a very important precedent for internet law in Canada, confirming that website operators are not responsible for defamatory content on other websites to which they have merely linked,” said then Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic (CIPPIC) director Philippa Lawson. “It’s also big win for free speech and for the internet as we know it.” Predictably, the case is being appealed. http://www.p2pnet.net/story/17398

And in case #2, in May, 2006, a woman named Nikki Hemming ran, and possibly still runs, Kazaa, the Australian P2P file sharing app owned by Sharman Networks and implicated in so many of the RIAA cases. Sharman and Hemming sued me for defamation. A comment post not written by me is an essential element. Sharman later pulled out, leaving it up to Hemming. This case is due to be heard in February, 2010, meaning I’ve had it hanging over my head all this time. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/5230776.stm

PS: Sorry, Paulus. Almost forgot Google. http://www.p2pnet.net/story/13232

Cheers!

byo & stw

Sorry for the double comment, because I posted the previous one before seeing your second.

I don’t think that google can index the torrents from private trackers. Hence why they’re “private”.

Another major difference is that google listens to take-down requests, while tpb does not (see http://thepiratebay.org/legal). If the copyright industry had a problem with a link in the google search results, google would remove that link (as it has before). Google wouldn’t remove all sub-pages (most likely), but would remove the individual page that the copyright industry legitimately complained about.

The problem is that there are hundreds of thousands of torrent links that they would have to complain about, and google is not simply going to remove all tpb links because of 1 request.

Google does not “facilitate copyright infringement”. One of the requirements of copyright infringment (I think) is that the infringer must commit “willful” infringement. They must know what they are doing. Google’s bots index everything, as you said. They do not index torrent websites for the purpose of helping people share copyrighted files. They index them because they’re a website. On the other hand, tpb knows that it infringes many copyrights (as you can see in the legal section) and I would guess from experience (though I don’t have hard facts to prove this statement) that more than 90% of the material on tpb is copyrighted.

If TPB and other “public” trackers were taken out, Google would still be able to locate torrents, and people would still be able to download via the ever-increasing amount of private trackers. The more public trackers you shut down, the more private trackers emerge.
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“…from the music industry’s point of view, something needed to change…”

Yes, that’s from the INDUSTRY’S point of view.
Millions of rationally-thinking people have a point of view as well.
We think something needs to change, all right – that being the Industry’s outdated business model built around exclusive distribution of physical media! They’re trying to control something that wasn’t designed to accomodate them and won’t – the Internet.

Google doesn’t need to create a devoted “torrent search engine”.
As you just said, Google indexes EVERYTHING on the web.
That makes Google an “everything search engine”.
It is capable of returning links to ALL pages that would, supposedly, “facilitate” copyright infringement.

If anything, a search engine designed to look strictly for torrents is a SCALED DOWN version of Google.
Google, technically, SHOULD be the primary target of all these missions aiming to shut down trackers of all kinds.

Jon has been sued for the content on p2pnet as the publisher and if I remember properly, so was Google in the same lawsuit.

The music industry realizes that without tpb, google will not be able to direct users to the tpb torrents. If they simply went after google, users would just go to tpb and nothing would change. Your argument that google should be responsible for linking to tpb results does not make sense to me. Your argument that google has a much better rep that tpb is true although. Because google is sometimes used for torrent searching, torrent searching is not google’s main purpose. Tbp is also a tracker, which helps people distribute the files.

I don’t think, however, that the tpb owners should have been arrested. I agree that the trial was completely unfair, having a biased judge. But from the music industry’s point of view, something needed to change. Though I do not know the ideal solution to this problem, it would probably end with tpb still distributing copyrighted material for free, but the music industry benefiting from it. Whether that benefiting aspect is exposure or having some perks that are impossible to pirate for users who actually bought it (like an online community), they need to compromise. Simply arresting tpb or shutting it down will not solve anything. Attacking file sharers will not solve anything either.