Official BitTorrent Search Opens

starrsoft writes "The official BitTorrent search has debuted. The search engine was built by BT inventor Bram Cohen. The question? Will he get sued? The BT search seems to be down right now. (It'll really be down after this story is posted...) Spiegel has more (En): "Naturally other sites such as Bitoogle, Isohunt, SuprNova or Torrentspy have tried before, but either they became fast a goal of legal attacks on the part of the industry or they furnished rather durchwachsene [??] results. BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast. The results come from a large number [of] more well-known and unknown... sites, and...permits sufficient restricting to the inquiry, in order to obtain really relevant results.""

Comments

Speedy

[AKAImBatman]

BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast.

So fast that the browser times out on a search for "mozilla". Hopefully they'll get those kinks worked out soon. :-/

Bandwidth generously provided by Hot or Not

That explains everything. ;-)

Will he get sued?

I still think that anyone trying to sue Bittorrent or a generic search engine would have a hard time of it. Bittorrent has so many legal uses that it just isn't funny. Here's some example of legal torrents:

Privateer Remake
OpenOffice
Star Trek: New Voyages (legal fan made)
FreeBSD
Star Wars: Revelations (legal fan made)
Xandros Free Edition
Mozilla Firefox
Doom 3 Demo
America's Army (now for Linux and OSX)

I could go on, but I think you get the point.

Re:Speedy

[Mitaphane]

Funny, Informative, and Insightful...A well done post good sir...

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Custard]

Blizzard's World of Warcraft game uses a bittorrent-like p2p download system for all its large patches.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not to mention all of Blizzard's gameplay/cinematic video downloads are available using their own bittorrent client.

Re:Speedy

[MoonBuggy]

Although BitTorrent is demonstrably usable for many non-infringing purposes, it would be naive to think that this search engine will have anything less than 50% (as a conservative estimate) legally dubious content indexed. To follow from that, however, I think my post from the previous discussion on this search engine is relevant:

I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.

Uploading music from within a country where that is outlawed seems to be fair game for legal action now (although countries where a fee is paid on blank media have a fairly strong case for to say they've already paid) and it's been that way for some time.

More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.

This search engine will now provide no copyrighted content. It will not tell users where to get copyrighted content. It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case? I'm really not sure it is.

Could I be taken to court for handing out [illegal item] - yes. Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so.

Re:Speedy

[John Seminal]

I still think that anyone trying to sue Bittorrent or a generic search engine would have a hard time of it. Bittorrent has so many legal uses that it just isn't funny. Here's some example of legal torrents

You are missing the point. They are not suing bit torrent, they are suing websites that have any instance of a copywrited item listed.

So if your website has the latest Lar's song, chances are they will try and shut you down. They will try and intimidate you. This is the reason I threw all my Metallica shit in the garbage. Fuck Metallica!!

Having open office and other legal stuff might mitigate your offence. You can then say, "hey, we don't host it, we just tell you where it is at".

It comes down to the question- is information free. Can we say whatever we want? Tell people anything? The old test was "emminent hard", where you could not scream "fire" in a theater. But what if I want to tell people how to make a bomb? Can I get arrested for that? What if I want to tell people why the president sucks while telling them how to make a bomb? Or why communism is better?

There is a threat to free speech, I think there will be a right wing revolution in the USA. Look at the library that now requires fingerprints. Look at how the patriot act lets law enforcment do a search without a warrent (BTW, someone explain to me how congress can pass a law that violates the constitution).

I think Bit Torrent is the least of our worries. When the time comes, the sites will go dead. The Routers will remove the IPA to URL link.

Re:Speedy

[djkoolaide]

Wow, I'm glad that Mozilla keeps their BitTorrent page updated with the latest builds :/ I wonder why they are only serving 1.01 on there?

Re:Speedy

[GMFTatsujin]

Surely that problem exists on the provider's side, not the search engine's side? If I share a movie file with BitTorrent, is it BitTorrent's fault?

If I share a movie via FTP on my web server and Google's spiders find it and link to it, is it Google's fault that I've broken copyright law?

The protocol is irrelevent. (The constant game of cat and mouse, protocol-of-the-week antics confirms this.) Even the uses to which people *put* the protocol are irrelevent. What matters is that people are sharing materials to which they have no copyrights, not that they're using BitTorrent to do it.

BitTorrent doesn't share movies. People share movies.

Re:Speedy

[Adrilla]

If they sue the bittorrent engine shouldn't they sue google since you can always use the 'filetype:torrent' search in the google engine?

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Doesn't Bram Cohen works for Blizzard, anyway?

Re:Speedy

[dougmc]

This is the reason I threw all my Metallica shit in the garbage. Fuck Metallica!!

Of course, this did nothing to actually fuck Metallica. In fact, it probably made them money rather than lost them money.

How so?

Well, if you kept your Metallica stuff (music, T-shirts, videos, I assume), then in the future you might decide that you just don't care for Metallica anymore. So you sell it. And the people who bought your used stuff might not buy new stuff from Metallica because they just bought your stuff.

But now that you've thrown it away (it's destroyed, presumably), this cannot happen, and now somebody will have to buy new Metallica shit, lining Lars' pockets with even more gold.

Good job!

Re:Speedy

[AKAImBatman]

I'm interested to see what is and isn't worthy of a lawsuit. This search engine is now three steps removed from the (assumed) copyright infringement.

The judge in the Napster case defined the litmus test that has been used by successive generations of P2P software. His decision is also what got Kazza off the hook.

As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.

Similarly, this search engine should be legal as long as it stays within the bounds of a generic service. If it starts favoring particular sites, then the owners are going to be in trouble. Also note that the owners of the search engine will need to promptly remove any links requested by someone claiming a copyright, in order to sustain carrier status under the DMCA.

It will (presumably) tell users where to get information (.torrent files and their associated trackers) on where to get copyrighted content. Is this enough for a case?

Definitely not. Distributing copyrighted material is not illegal. Illegally distributing copyrighted material is illegal. I realize most people around here don't catch the distinction, so I'll attempt to explain.

You see, when the Mozilla Foundation produces a release of FireFox they have an automatic copyright on their work. That copyright gives them the sole control over its redistribution. In MF's case, they decide to freely allow for BitTorrent distribution and redistribution. That is their right as a copyright holder. However, when George Lucas produced Star Wars III he chose to only allow for distribution to theaters under a royalty agreement. Redistribution is not permitted (except for perhaps companies who create film copies on behalf of Lucas) and thus is illegal if found on a P2P network.

Re:Speedy

[Tony Hoyle]

Blizzard's World of Warcraft game uses a bittorrent-like p2p download system for all its large patches. ..which is why anyone with any sense waits for the fileplanet mirror.

BT is great if you're not behind a firewall or on a corporate network... for normal usage get used to downloading your 500MB file at 1k/second.

I have 20 machines behind this firewall.. there is no way in hell port forwarding is going to work, so WoW doesn't get updated for a couple of weeks while until the mirrors get up to speed.

Re:Speedy

[NetNifty]

Don't think so. He worked shortly for Valve though.

Re:Speedy

[CSMastermind]

While I do agree with you in your statement that it's the his fault. I'd point out that Bittorrent is more likely to get sued than google if nothing else, but simply for the fact that they not only provide a scearch engine, but a means to use what you find on the scearch engine. I know, it'd be like google making a media player but that's just not how the MIAA and RIAA see it.

Re:Speedy

[lowrydr310]

Could I be taken to court for handing out [illegal item] - yes. Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so.

I'm guessing that because the [illegal item] you're talking about is a bunch of 1s and 0s, a direct comparison can't be made (at least in the minds of lawyers and the MPAA/RIAA). I agree with that statement 100%, but there are many examples of how complex it is to accurately compare a digital file to a physical item.

Re:Speedy

[NetNifty]

I know you can just extract the torrent with a resource editor and use your own BT client, but it's also worth noting that the WoW BT client has issues of it's own. You can't cap either upload or download on it and as a result when I run the patcher, it pretty much seems to disable my internet access until it's done (web pages time out, pings timeout on first hop to ISP etc).

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

If I'm looking for a legal file, why wouldn't I just go to the official Web site? The BitTorrent search engine doesn't ensure that you're getting the official torrent.

Re:Speedy

[AKAImBatman]

If I'm looking for a legal file, why wouldn't I just go to the official Web site?

Take another look at the torrents I posted. Most of them are from the official websites. Legal content distributers like BitTorrent because it offloads the cost of data transfer to the users, potentially saving the distributer thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.

In other words, BitTorrent is a really advanced download system, not a P2P pirating network as many people seem to think. The catch is that it happens to be useful for piracy due to the fact that many illegal files are very large and pirates have limited bandwidth.

Re:Speedy

[claussenvenable]

>The judge in the Napster case defined the litmus
>test that has been used by successive generations
>of P2P software. His decision is also what got...
^^^
The judge in the Napster case was Marylin Hall Patel. I had lunch with her a couple of times in college when working on a mock trial. Smart lady.

Lady being the operative term here ;)

Re:Speedy

[h4rm0ny]

Don't underestimate symbolism. Aside from expressing how he feels to himself, he expresses to many others how he feels. A band depends on other people for its worth. Actions like this diminish it, even if it doesn't cost them a few quid immediately.

Re:Speedy

[AKAImBatman]

My apologies. Her decision established the litmus test for P2P software. ;-)

Re:Speedy

[bani]

You can bet he'll get sued.

bittorrent provides an excellent distribution mechanism for opensource projects (linux,bsd,openoffice,mozilla,etc).

opensource is a major threat to the BSA's members, and the BSA is diametrically opposed to opensource.

The BSA will attack bittorrent with the rallying cry of "anti piracy" but a secondary goal is to hurt opensource.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.

That's great for leagality of P2P and bitorrent. But the bittorrent searches will fail the test. They are shutting down the search engine servers not people who use the client.

Re:Speedy

[fm6]

A fan-produced Star Trek movie is definitely not legal. Viacom may have trouble keeping up with all the trademark-infringing Trekkies out there, but that doesn't mean they're not breaking any rules.

Re:Speedy

[AKAImBatman]

But the bittorrent searches will fail the test. They are shutting down the search engine servers not people who use the client.

No, illegal BitTorrent indexes are being shut down. I have yet to see an actual torrent crawler along the lines of Google. Such a crawler would be legal under the carrier status of the DMCA. As long as the search engine keeps up with requests to remove links to torrents of illegal material, they can stay in business. Any sort of FBI purge prior to attempting communications would likely result in tremendous liability for the FBI and/or reporters of the infringement.

(P.S. The DMCA isn't all that bad a law if you read it. It's just that certain parts of it are not well thought through and have been heavily exploited by the MPAA.)

Re:Speedy

[AKAImBatman]

A fan-produced Star Trek movie is definitely not legal.

Have you been to their site? They have explicit permission to create these episodes. In general, Paramount has stated that they don't mind too much as long as no one is making money off of their trademarks. Same thing with the Star Wars film. George Lucas has given quite a bit of leeway to fans in creating works based on his universe.

I'm 99.5% certain of the legality of all the torrents I've linked to. Even in the (extremely slim) chance that one of them is contested by a trademark or copyright holder, that's for the otherwise upstanding distribution sites to sort out.

Re:Speedy

[Wwolmack]

More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.

Actually, it wasn't "successful legal action". I don't know about BTefnet, but it was Cease & Desist letters that shut suprnova down. Any clown can send out a C&D letter, whether there is any real legal weight behind it is subject to an actual lawsuit that isn't laughed out of court.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Take another look at the torrents I posted. Most of them are from the official websites. Legal content distributers like BitTorrent because it offloads the cost of data transfer to the users, potentially saving the distributer thousands of dollars in bandwidth costs.

I know this; I download legal torrents on occasion. My point is that I don't use search engines to find my Fedora Core torrents -- I just go to the Fedora Web site. So this new search engine does not help people looking for legal content, because that stuff was already easy to find.

Re:Speedy

[grazzy]

It's a bit like with bombs, if you drop them on afghanistanis or iraqis, or pretty much anyone that doesnt obey the wall street - they're cool. Try dropping them on an american.

You get my point?

Re:Speedy

[Rei]

Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so

Bad analogy. An appropriate analogy would be:

"Could I be taken to court if Joe Bloggs asks me whether there are any good drugs in town, and I not only inform him of the variety of drugs available (search), but drive him to the scene and point out the dealer to him (direct link), and telling him what to tell the dealer so that the dealer will know that Joe is not a narc and can purchase (special download mechanism)"

The answer is probably "yes". You'd be a secondary offender.

Re:Speedy

[mspohr]

You may find it interesting that Metallica has a lakefront house near where I live. They are having constant hassles with people because they keep trying to close "their" beach even though the beach is public access up to high water mark. This is the same as their attitude on their music... greedy.

Re:Speedy

[TheoMurpse]

More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet [...] have been subject to successful legal action.

See, that's the thing. They've been sued, but nothing in the strict legal sense has been successful yet. No P2P cases have been decided by a court yet. This is why the Grokster case is so important.

Re:Speedy

[farble1670]

any p2p client has many legal uses. i can find an unlimited number of freely sharable files using ed2k network. empirical evidence shows that is irrelevant.

Re:Speedy

[destuxor]

I haven't used WoW's BT software, but I remember when FilePlanet crashed minutes after the beta was released everyone knew another distribution method was necessary and bittorrent is just that.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

I've never understood the Metallica case.

Even if in the past they encouraged trading, its up to them to say Hey When We Were A Small Unknown Band, It Benefitted Us, But Not That We Are Superstars, It Doesn't Anymore -- So Stop It -- and thats what they did at first.

Being true fans, you'd have quite posting these respecting their rights. It might be moronic in your mind, but they did write the music...it had nothing to do with you and your word of mouth promotion no matter how much you'd like to think so. Given this, the only folks that got sued were folks that didn't give a damn about the band and even then -- I don't remember Metallica actually suing any individual. They wanted their music off the internet and thats it.

I don't know why its so hard for others to respect the rights of those that they admire. Even if you don't respect copyright and think its insane -- I'd hope you still treated these guys with the respect they ask for. I have friends with religions I don't believe in -- I still go out of my way to not offend them and try to understand them...I do the same with copyrights.

I really don't know why this is such a hard concept.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you suppose the difference is between a firewall and a "corporate network?"

Re:Speedy

[mzieg]

...this new search engine does not help people looking for legal content, because that stuff was already easy to find

Yeah, Coward here's right. I've always found Google similarly useless, because legal information was already easy to find: you just go to http://foo.com/path/to/query?page=123456.

Legal users never need search engines. Duh!

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Be careful, his Sarcasm Sensor may be busted.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Luddite]

>> as a result when I run the patcher, it pretty much seems to disable my internet access until it's done (web pages time out, pings timeout on first hop.

Forget patching, BattleNet does the same thing when I just try to play on it. Too bad there wasn't an open source BattleNet.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Corporate networks are either incompetently configured or far more anal.

Re:Speedy

[Andy Gardner]

I've resorted to using a sundial to measure seek times, its going to be getting dark soon though....

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

where is their house?

they all live together?

Re:Speedy

[grmoc]

The whole "no-reverse engineering" provision is pretty dang scary to me.. .. So I'd say it wasn't a good law by any stretch of the imagination, because it enforces vendor lock-in, which -may- have absolutely NOTHING to do with defending copyright. .. The prime example of this is the DVD region stuff. The main reason to do this, from a market perspective, is that you can sell to China at a lower price than in the U.S., and those people in the U.S. are prevented from playing those chinese discs on their american dvd players, regardless of whether or not those discs were legally purchased.

There are other problems.

Re:Speedy

[tha_mink]

Yes, good post. Especially since a search for Mozilla when I did it returned the following...

type Exception report message description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request. exception javax.servlet.ServletException at org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.handlePa geException(PageContextImpl.java:498) at org.apache.jsp.search_jsp._jspService(search_jsp.j ava:659) at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(Http JspBase.java:92) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.servic e(JspServletWrapper.java:162) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFil e(JspServlet.java:240) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspSe rvlet.java:187) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.in ternalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:200) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.ac cess$000(ApplicationFilterChain.java:51) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain$1. run(ApplicationFilterChain.java:129) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.do Filter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:125) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invo ke(StandardWrapperValve.java:209) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invo ke(StandardContextValve.java:144) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.invoke(St andardContext.java:2358) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke( StandardHostValve.java:133) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorDispatcherValve.in voke(ErrorDispatcherValve.java:118) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:594) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke (ErrorReportValve.java:116) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:594) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invok e(StandardEngineValve.java:127) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteAdapter.service(C

Re:Speedy

[rainman_bc]

I'd also like to point out that Google filters results based on DMCA ( Even if you are not in America btw ).

So if Google has to filter out protected content per the DMCA, why wouldn't this search engine have to?

Re:Speedy

[XMyth]

Funny, I regularly get 500kbps+ download speeds on well seeded files. On a file with 60 seeds (and 30 leechers) earlier today I was getting 120kbps. This is on a corp. network with no ports forwarded to my machine.

Re:Speedy

[kyhwana]

You used to be able to do that, they seem to have changed is to you can't, unless anyone knows of a way to get it out of the newer patchers..

Re:Speedy

[vertinox]

You know if Chinese DVDs are pretty cheap, so are the players. Of course I have yet to figure out this remote.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

I have 20 machines behind this firewall.. there is no way in hell port forwarding is going to work

No, but it should be trivial to download the file to one machine with a normal BT client and then copy it to the other ones quickly over the LAN. It should be faster than doing them all at the same time over BT (unless the different BT clients happened to be peered up with each other, and even then it's not necessarily as fast).

Less automated, but certainly doable, and probably faster.

Re:Speedy

[squidsoup]

I've been playing Guild Wars recently, which like WoW is a MMORPG. The patching system they have implimented is quite remarkable in that you really don't even know it's there. The Guild Wars client, very unobtrusively, streams new content and patches while you are playing.

Monolithic patches are so 2004 :)

Re:Speedy

[petermgreen]

google for bnetd and you get a british site offering it

it doesn't work with the latest patch versions of the games though iirc 1.07 is the most recent version that works with it (it shouldn't be too hard to find the 1.07 patch on the net).

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Those error messages are so leet you just can't understand.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know about that. It seemed to me her decisions, even when correct, were based on the wrong logic. Maybe if I had lunch with her, I'd understand ;-P

Re:Speedy

[NutscrapeSucks]

As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.

This might have been an issue, but the determining legal point was that Napster was a centralized system and therefore knew full well that copyright infringement was occurring and could have acted to stop it. Futhermore, Napster had a huge papertrail describing their infringement-based business model.

Systems like Kazaa are decentrilized to the point where Kazaa themselves can't stop any particular file from being traded. So while their intent is to support copyright infrimgent, they've sofar escaped on technicalities. Unfortunately, most "tracker" sites are more like Napster than Kazaa.

Re:Speedy

[strider44]

Damn, I wish I had 20 machines behind a firewall like all of the normal users...

Re:Speedy

[StikyPad]

You make interesting points, but it really comes down to one question:

Can they afford the legal battle?

Until the answer to this question is yes, all others will remain unanswered. As it stands, the mere threat of legal action is enough to send anyone with less than deep pockets scurrying.

Re:Speedy

[cgenman]

In general, Paramount has stated that they don't mind too much as long as no one is making money off of their trademarks.

Well, that explains Enterprise.

Re:Speedy

[Terranaut]

Great, now there's an easy way for the Feds, RIAA, MPAA, FAST (Federation Against Software Theft) and others, to find bittorrent tracker sites and shut them down.

Re:Speedy

[DJOtaku]

ray guns don't kill zorbians zorbians kill zorbians

Re:Speedy

[cpt kangarooski]

As I understand the case, the judge said that a technology would be legal if it was demonstratably useful and intended for legal purposes. Napster failed that test, because there simply wasn't an existing base of legal music files at the time. Kazza succeeded because it was able to show that its design allowed for any type of file regardless of legality.

This isn't correct.

The Sony case, from the Supreme Court, said that if a technology is capable of substantial noninfringing uses, the knowledge prong of contributory infringement isn't satisfied merely by making the technology.

Note that this doesn't require there to be current substantial noninfringing uses (though that is helpful) but that there need only be the potential of them.

The Napster court, followed Sony and did not ascribe knowledge to it based on the capabilities of the software. However, it did find that for other reasons, they did have sufficient knowledge (and contribution) for contributory liability to stand, and that they vicariously infringed.

What later P2P networks have been doing is ensuring that they are not in a position to have knowledge whilst contributing to infringement, and that they cannot vicariously infringe. They've been doing this basically by decentralizing, so that they are akin to Sony, which makes VCRs, but is unable to control what people do with them. Napster had the ability to kick people off, filter out files on the network, etc. which was their downfall.

The Grokster case may reverse Sony in some fashion -- we'll know in the next couple of months.

At any rate, search engines are too controllable by their maintainers to rely on Sony as a defense. Thus, the 512 safeharbor is key. But it takes some work to comply with it, so hopefully they have done so.

Re:Speedy

[cpt kangarooski]

I assure you, there is no chance whatsoever that the people running those sites could win in court.

Re:Speedy

[xQx]

Hahaha, and that's unlike a firewall how?

I would've gone with "A firewall is either a little icon on a network diagram that makes management feel secure, or a box that has 'PIX' or 'Checkpoint' on it that is in global passthrough because it's so annoying to try to configure, or any other device that performs NAT" whereas a corperate network is what (sometimes) connects your ancient desktop to the internet.

Re:Speedy

[DeadlyDonkey]

Guild Wars isn't an MMORPG. It's developers refer to it as a CORPG (Competitive Online Role-Playing Game). Not to say that it's any better or worse than WoW, since I've played both and think they are both great, but it is a very different style of play from WoW.

Re:Speedy

[krunk4ever]

I agree completely with what you said. What suprnova and the others did wrong was that they categorized stuff into illegal contents like Movies, Music, Games, Software, etc. What this search engine does is exactly what Google does, but instead of finding webpages, it finds torrent files.

Re:Speedy

[Anonymous Coward]

Not BitTorrent-like. BitTorrent.

Re:Speedy

[Yer Mom]

Try NetLimiter... you can set up/download limits on a per-app basis.

Re:Speedy

[Krimszon]

Also note that the owners of the search engine will need to promptly remove any links requested by someone claiming a copyright

...requested by someone claiming a copyright, or ...requested by someone who can prove that said file breaches copyright which he/she can prove he/she actually owns.

Re:Speedy

[lupinstel]

Yup. The are like the Ramones now, they all took the same last name...Metallica. PS. Metallica started sucking a long time ago.

Re:Speedy

[Methlin]

I know you can just extract the torrent with a resource editor and use your own BT client,

In fact you don't even need the resource editor, just a hex viewer and tail, which is what I do to download and continue seeding on my Linux system at work.

but it's also worth noting that the WoW BT client has issues of it's own. You can't cap either upload

Oh yes you can, you just have to run the patcher from the command line instead of having the client auto-launch it. It has options for:

• limiting upload rates, /maxuploadrate
• how many peers to upload to, /maxuploads
• how many peers to talk to, /maxallowin
• how many peers to download from, /maxsimultaneous

It also recently (around the 2nd or 3rd retail patch) has built in support for direct download from Blizzard servers (hosts listed in the torrent). It does however lack support of limiting download rate.

Re:Speedy

[nystire]

Unfortunately, the way things are moving it will be the former and not the latter.

Re:Speedy

[mspohr]

This is a vacation house which is owned by one of the band members. (I don't know any of their names and haven't paid enough attention to the newspaper articles to remember any of the names so I don't know who owns it.)

It just struck me that their behaviour with their music is the same as that with the house... they want to grab as much as possible and trample on the rights of others.

Re:Speedy

[bcmm]

Lets ban CDs. They have legitimate purposes, but you can use them to pirate stuff to.

Oh yeah, and can we stop that "Internet" thing too?

help mee

[AtariDatacenter]

"I don't understand? The search engine doesn't work! It just sits there and does nothing!"

Re:help mee

[AtariDatacenter]

"I don't understand? The search engine doesn't work! It just sits there and does nothing!"

My boss just walked by. He said that he has the same problem with some of his employees. [oops!]

Re:help mee

[Thud457]

Hey, at least they aren't actively breaking stuff!

Re:help mee

[rashed_karim]

It seems like BT inventor Bram Cohen is a novice JSP programmer. His site is vulnerable to SQL injection, and reveals error messages, instead of displaying a generic error page. But we all owe him for inventing BitTorrent, a great idea and a great use of distributed computing.

use gnutella?

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder why people haven't been using many of the other p2p applications out there, particularly the decentralized ones, to search for .torrent files. Or am I just crazy?

Re:use gnutella?

[crow]

Gnutella faces the key problem of any new p2p network: It's much easier to develop the technology than to get people to use it. The new technology has to be way better before people will switch to it, because switching to something new means giving up on the large user base of the old system.

Re:use gnutella?

[DCstewieG]

The problem then is getting torrents where the tracker is down. Of course, even that is less of an issue now...

Re:use gnutella?

[danormsby]

I think this is because torrents only recently became decentralized themselves. What is the point in searching for a torrent to find the server orchestrating it is down?

Re:use gnutella?

[rbarreira]

Actually I've been able to find a lot of torrent files in emule...

Re:use gnutella?

[m50d]

The only reason to use torrents at all is because they're sexy. They're new and popular. People who actually care about getting the files, which are the only ones who wouldn't turn their noses up at "old tech" like gnutella, aren't using bittorrent.

Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[yotto]

And slashdot taketh away. I coudln't even get one search in.

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[bnitsua]

actually, it was down before the article was posted. of course, I doubt the slashdot article is helping any...

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[LiquidCoooled]

Slashdot would be good to setup a BT search engine.

A slashdot branded site would have more copies of recent movies than Blockbuster!

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[Spy der Mann]

Question. If it can't stand the /. effect, how can we be sure it can stand EVERYDAY USE? I mean, google has never been slashdotted, has it?

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[JeffZakaib]

Remember when Gmail went live...?

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[LiquidCoooled]

Yes it has.

There was talk of a DOS attack on google and yahoo a few months ago.
Google did infact go down for a while, but most of it was:

u1: "you hear google's down?"
u2: "No? its still working here look..clickity..oh!"
u2: "Your right, clickity its not working, watch..clickity"
u1: "clickity its still not working here either"

u2: "dude, we r0x"

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[Jugalator]

It actually worked once for me, and I can report that searching for "sith" gives the expected results. :-p

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

To tell you the truth, just I probably have more movies than any one Blockbuster.

I have about 7 terabytes of various rips: downloaded, from friends, and taken from library DVDs and from rental DVDs. Around 9500 movies.

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

wow, i'm impressed - your cock must be huge.

Re:Bittorrent givith bandwidth

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah someone needs to setup a mirror (*ducks)

So what is BitTorrent anyway

[WillAffleckUW]

and who are those dark sunglass-wearing individuals in grey trenchcoats at my door?

I just hate it...

[kclittle]

I just hate it when things go down the durchwachsene...

Re:I just hate it...

[BrianGa]

I was just thinking that last night!

fast?

[Anonymous Coward]

Google...fast?

More like "Loading..." fast.

Coming soon!

[seymansey]

The slashdot story about this site being sued!

"The BT search seems to be down right now."

[lildogie]

Gee, I can't imagine why.

In other news...

[Folmer]

Elitetorrents.org gets closed by the feds: http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/arti cles/starwars052505.htm

Re:In other news...

[tricops]

One thing that's nice to see in the ICE press release is this (emphasis added):

"ICE and the FBI have shut down a group of online criminals who were using legitimate technology to create one-stop shopping for the illegal sharing of movies, games, software and music."

Re:In other news...

[Orgazmus]

I didnt know the fed where AOL'ERS!!!!!111!!1!

Re:In other news...

[Deliveranc3]

One thing that's nice to see in the ICE press release is this (emphasis added): "ICE and the FBI have shut down a group of online criminals who were using legitimate technology to create one-stop shopping for the illegal sharing of movies, games, software and music."

Emphasis: Mine.

Re:In other news...

[WRoach]

Looks more like an owl to me :P

Re:In other news...

[tricops]

I'm not really sure what your point is. That's irrelevant to what I was pointing out, which is that they called bittorrent legitimate technology. I don't see how their use of the word shopping has anything to do with that...

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Woah, ICE shut them down? Probably for distributing Rolemaster?

Re:In other news...

[tricops]

Yeah, so? Didn't say I agreed with that poor piece of wording. That still has nothing to do with them saying bittorrent is legitimate technology.

I think he'll get sued but...

[CSMastermind]

I don't think the legal efforts against him will be successfull. Here's why:

When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession. Not the case here. Even if they were able to prove that you could get content from the network, you aren't technically scearching for the content you get. You're scearching for torrents, which are small files with no real copy righted data in them. They're little road signs that point you where to go. It would be like getting arrested for creating a phone book just because you might be able to find the number of someone who has drugs in the book.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[solitarian]

so if i were to post a link to the DeCSS code a couple years ago. i wouldn't get sued, because i have only posted a "road sign" to the code?
i wish laws and our courts were more intelligent, but i don't think we can expect the correct judgement from our judiciary system.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[AKAImBatman]

When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession. Not the case here.

It doesn't matter. If it was found that the only purpose of the search engine was to assist in illegal activities, it would be just as illegal as if it carried the content itself.

That being said, my understanding is that this is supposed to be a generic search engine. As long as the owner keeps his nose clean, a judge is likely to find in his favor due to an "overwhelming degree of legal uses".

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[rackhamh]

I for one don't think the legal efforts against him will be successful because the site doesn't work.

*IAA Guy 1: Hey, a BitTorrent search site! Let's sue them!

*IAA Guy 2: Yeah! Enter in a search and see what kind of illegal stuff comes up!

*IAA Guy 1: ... ... ... ...

*IAA guys die of old age.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[coopaq]

It would be like getting arrested for creating a phone book just because you might be able to find the number of someone who has drugs in the book

What if the phone book clearly marked who was selling drugs and you made this book available to everyone on the internet even kids and not only that most of it is used to call drug dealers to pretend to buy drugs but really to steal movies illegaly!!!

Muhhhahahahaha!!!!

--I am not a script and I still can't read that garbled letters image!

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Em Adespoton]

No, if you created a search engine that happened to index the page with the linnk to DeCSS code, you wouldn't be successfully sued. The search engine indiscriminately references all road signs it finds.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[FriedTurkey]

Even if it is a loophole in the laws, it will be quickly plugged with legislation soon. I'll take a million dollar bet on it.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Travelsonic]

What if the phone book clearly marked who was selling drugs and you made this book available to everyone on the internet even kids and not only that most of it is used to call drug dealers to pretend to buy drugs but really to steal movies illegaly!!!

1. The Torrent Serarch Engine does not call out specific torrents, legal or illegaly.

Copyright infringement is copying, not theft.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[mpcooke3]

Metaphor Error.

You can't ask the phone book for class A drugs and get a valid number you can ask a torrent search site for a particular copyrighted film and get the right torrent.

Therefore the phone book is not helping you engage in an illegal activity but the torrent site might be.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Bradee-oh!]

so if i were to post a link to the DeCSS code a couple years ago. i wouldn't get sued, because i have only posted a "road sign" to the code?

Someone further up in the thread put it perfectly. I believe the metaphor went like this -

If you asked me for some illegal drugs and I said, "Sure, here you go," I'd most definitely be going to court over that. However if you asked me for some illegal drugs and I said "Joe Bloggs on the other side of town might be able to put you in touch with someone who has the drugs," the case against me would be much less concrete.

In the case of the torrent search engine, you aren't pointing someone directly at the illegal goods. Far from it. Years ago if you linked directly to DeCSS, you're sued. However if you linked to a website that had links to DeCSS you'd have a hard time finding someone that could successfully prosecute you. With torrent search it's more like linking to a website(the torrent) that links to a website(the hosting BT user) that links to the file(the file on the host's compy).

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[coopaq]

to call drug dealers to pretend to buy drugs but really to steal movies illegaly!!!

No it's theft! The drug dealers will actually steal the real for you!

It's my fscking story asshat!

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[dougmc]

When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession.

I assume that by `content' you mean `infringing content'? And by `their possession' you mean on their servers?

If so, what content are you talking about? There were no mp3s hosted on Napster's servers.

This argument would work on mp3.com's `my.mp3.com' thing where you could prove that you own a CD and then it would let you play `it' from anywhere, but I don't see how it applies to Napster.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Travelsonic]

Oh, thanks for clearing it up.

Don't have to get so defensive, blowhole!

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[dominator]

Rather than making guesses as to whether legal efforts against Bram would be successful, he could've just waited a few weeks and found out for certain. A much safer bet (from a purely legal perspective) would've been to see how the Supreme Court Case MGM v. Grokster was decided. The ruling is due any day now (tm).

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Short Circuit]

The search engine indiscriminately references all road signs it finds.

Until the search engine gets contacted by the Church of Scientology, you mean.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Fletch]

When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession.

Huh? All that passed through Napster's servers were file hashes and metadata. The transfers went from one user straight to another.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Maybe not but you can look up Escort Agencies, which are (usually) illegal.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can ask the phone book for an escort service and get the number of a hooker.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Ochu]

Nah. A phone book has thousands of numbers, and only one is your dealer. A tracker is either the location of something you can download, or something you can't. Its more like getting arrested for creating a phone book that just has the number of your dealer in it. And any way, who looks for their dealer in a phone book? I mean, half of those asses use fake names any way; there sure as hell ain't no "Tiger 12" in my phone book. Actually... No. There isn't. Although there does appear to be a dude called "PC Repair". And another thing. Whats the difference between the yellow pages and the phone book anyway?

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[CSMastermind]

Your right, maybe I was unclear. I just meant that Napster was hosting a scearch and the servers to transfer the content. The Bittorrent website doesn't deal with data transfer of the actual content, they just transfer torrents.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[triffidsting]

But my understanding is that it is the unauthorized distribution of copyrighted works (ie uploading/sharing) that is illegal, and the search engine would only benefit downloaders.

Or would it? Since BT causes downloaders to automatically share...

Great, now I'm confused.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[ryusen]

It won't matter. IF they really want to sue, they will do it, regardless of the validity of the law or not. If they put enough money and legal blocks, BT will "lose" the case, just because they won't have enough money to defend itself. This will shortly be followed by the AA's parading abotu how they've destroyed another source of priacy that was responsible for millions in losses and people on /. shouting "down withthe man!"

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[kfg]

I really understand what you're saying, but you are not entirely correct. The phone company doesn't do much to vet the listings. You tell them a name you want your home number listed under and they'll print it. Haywood Jablome, for instance, lasted for some years in my local phone book.

More pertinent to your premise a local chain competing with Radio Shack operated for 10 years or so selling drugs over the counter at retail.

There are these things called "code words", which, as it happens, were included in their Yellow Pages ad. People were, indeed, able to look them up in the phone book and determine that they purported to be a source for illegal drugs.

Massage parlors, the already mentioned escort services and a small host of other businesses that are known to, occasionally, offer illegal goods and services, use the phone book in a like manner and if you know the local lingo you can often determine which ones actually offer such services from their phone book ads. Once one goes deep into the dark side certain unusal names attached to home phone numbers function as code words. Hermine Xenophone, just to make up a possible example on the spot.

There are all sorts of goods that are legal in one context but illegal in another, kinda like some content files (it's perfectly legal to download it for free from this site, but not from that one), and these businesses operate right out in the open in the phone book using "code words" like "Guns," or "Supermarket."

More relevant to the current discussion, the phone numbers you can look up to acquire tools and goods to commit copyright infringement are legion. Your local library, prominantly listed, will not only supply you with the copyrighted goods, but the machinery with which to infringe at only ten cents a page. They don't even monitor whether you are using their services for illegal useses or not (and there is "abandonware" in the book trade. You can buy a legitmate used copy for $200, or copy it for $10)

Nobody's busting them, or the phone company, even after illegal activity has been proven.

KFG

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't it time then for all these brilliant innovative individuals to stop doing business in America and move elsewhere ?

Seems like everyone wants to have their cake and eat it; they want all the benefits of the US but none of the bullshit laws. I'm not sure you can have it both ways. If you have a brilliant p2p type technology then it seems the US is worst place to market it.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[sik0fewl]

A closer metaphor would be yellow pages with an "Illicit Drugs" section.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[coopaq]

Haha! Nice!

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Travelsonic]

methinks "The Adventures of Pete & Pete" was a bad influence on me.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[Rei]

I don't know why we keep seing this notion - that courts are somehow stupid. Yes, you're not pointing to the file - you're pointing to a torrent. But the torrent only serves one purpose: to get the file that it codes for. People in the legal system can put two and two together, you know.

Our legal system isn't designed to be full of "whoops!"s and "gotcha!"s to let crafty people off the hook. A judge looks at this, and they know exactly what your intent was, and they're not going to let you get away with it. It's no more a "get out of jail free card" than it would be to hyperlink to a page that then redirects you to illegal content would not count as linking to illegal content. *Intent* is what they care about. And the intent of linking to a torrent for a file is to enable as many people as possible to acquire that file.

And I say this, BTW, as a person who hates the RIAA, MPAA, BSA, and the concept of intellectual property in general.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[lucifer_666]

But my dealer is listed in the phone book!

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[cpt kangarooski]

When Napster was sued they actually had content in their possession.

Yeah, but that was not really an important part of the case.

Even if they were able to prove that you could get content from the network, you aren't technically scearching for the content you get. You're scearching for torrents, which are small files with no real copy righted data in them.

So?

The main issue is whether running the search engine materially contributes in some way to someone else's copyright infringement, and if so, whether the people running the engine knew or should've known at the time.

I can't say I've heard of any cases that hinged on how indirect the contribution was, so long as it was material and done knowingly at the time.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[cpt kangarooski]

Up or down, they're both illegal.

Re:I think he'll get sued but...

[mpcooke3]

These are good points but if it comes down legally to plausibile deniability i think the torrent sites will have less luck than the phone book.

Durchwachsen

[slavemowgli]

"durchwachsen" means "marbled" or "streaky" when applied to meat, but can also be used figuratively, meaning "mixed", "so-so" etc.

Re:Durchwachsen

[joke-boy]

Probably the most idiomatic translation would be "spotty".

Re:Durchwachsen

[incom]

Language? Guessing german, but you never know.

Re:Durchwachsen

[orderb13]

Since the reference was to Spiegel, German would be your best bet.

Re:Durchwachsen

[TekGoNos]

Literally "grown through".

In the article, it may be translated to "mixed".

However, "eher durchwachsen" is just a very polite way to say "almost, but not always, completly crap".

Re:Durchwachsen

[slavemowgli]

German, yes.

Re:Durchwachsen

[debest]

"eher durchwachsen" is just a very polite way to say "almost, but not always, completly crap".

I didn't know that "Slashdot" had a German translation! ;-)

The strength of bit torrent

[ProfaneBaby]

Bit Torrent's strength has always been that it's a content neutral utility that is great for efficient P2P. The fact that it's been picked up by some large corporations for distributing large files helps. An official search tool will damage that position.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure it will be incredibly useful. I'm also sure, that it will be filled with porn, illegal software, and illegal copies of music (whether you agree with the law or not, it's still illegal). That hurts bit torrent's reputation as content neutral, and will make some larger backers step away.

Apparently, though, the makers find it more useful to be widely used than widely respected. Fair enough, it's their toy. Unfortunate, though, that it can't be used as a shining, piracy free star in an otherwise ugly niche of the internet.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[Tx]

Unfortunate, though, that it can't be used as a shining, piracy free star in an otherwise ugly niche of the internet.

Ummm, I think the boat was missed on that one some time ago dude. Don't know where you've been, but bittorrent is the pirates tool of choice for fast distribution of new "warez".

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

Unfortunate, though, that it can't be used as a shining, piracy free star in an otherwise ugly niche of the internet.

BT was hardly that before the official search engine.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[BlogPope]

Unfortunate, though, that it can't be used as a shining, piracy free star in an otherwise ugly niche of the internet.

Yeah, because nobody uses Bit Torrent for piracy NOW.

BT Search could easily work with content providers to filter out copyrighted works from the results. It wouldn't be perfect but it would be enough to prove theri intentions, much like Apple's iTunes. That really seems to be the main thing they are looking for anyway.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[almostmanda]

Apparently, though, the makers find it more useful to be widely used than widely respected.

Maybe that's because the software functions better with more users? Bittorrent would be pointless if it was limited to small circles posting approved material.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[Haiku 4 U]

All tools are neutral
People are good & evil.
Blame people, not tools.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[Have Blue]

No. BitTorrent's strength has always been that it's not centralized. Napster had a single central point through which all Napster traffic passed; when that was shut down Napster was useless for illegal and legal content alike. The same thing happened (or could happen) to Kazaa. But with BitTorrent, every tracker is completely independent of every other tracker. When SuprNova got shut down, it had absolutely no effect on the tracker operated by a game fansite I work on. If every single BT tracker or search site on the net was shut down, it would still have no effect on our tracker, which serves only legitimate content. The trackers run by those large corporations are likewise completely independent from trackers serving illegal content.

BT isn't going to be a shining, piracy free star because there is no "the BitTorrent" like there was "the Napster". There's just a lot of BT users like there are a lot of FTP users, and every use is different and independent.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

HTTP's strength has always been that it's a content neutral utility that is great for efficient P2P. The fact that it's been picked up by some large corporations for distributing content helps. An official search tool will damage that position.

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure it will be incredibly useful. I'm also sure, that it will be filled with porn, illegal software, and illegal copies of music (whether you agree with the law or not, it's still illegal). That hurts HTTP's reputation as content neutral, and will make some larger backers step away.

Apparently, though, the makers find it more useful to be widely used than widely respected. Fair enough, it's their toy. Unfortunate, though, that it can't be used as a shining, piracy free star in an otherwise ugly niche of the ...

Damn. It almost worked.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[Anonymous Coward]

On the contrary. The first search I performed was for "slackware". The official slackware site only has torrents for 10.1. But what if I (to see what a certain bit of code looked like for my own reference) wanted 9.0. Someone might have made a torrent for there own use which otherwise I wouldn't be able to find. Or what if I didn't remember exactly what a torrent a friend made and told me I should get was named? Instead of having to do a google search which may or may not turn up with a site that hosts the torrent, I can search here for some of the stuff in the name and get it.

As for the shining, piracy free star, I don't think anything will ever be that. Hell, even FTP is used for illegal file sharing. Anything that allows file transport of any kind *will* be used to transport stuff illegally. That's just the way the world works.

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[iminplaya]

...and will make some larger backers step away.

To me that's a good thing. It means that the program won't be bought out by some big parasitic corp. That will help to insure that do-it-yourself distribution is available to everyone.

Unfortunate, though, that it can't be used as a shining, piracy free star in an otherwise ugly niche of the internet.

Nor should it be restricted in such a way. There's nothing necessarily ugly about unauthorized distribution. You can be illegal and still be beautiful :-)

Re:The strength of bit torrent

[jam3972]

Don't get me wrong - I'm sure it will be incredibly useful. I'm also sure, that it will be filled with porn, illegal software, and illegal copies of music

Welcome to the internet!

Distributed webhosting

[Anonymous Coward]

All that's left to do now is build a bittorrent-based webserver

Re:Distributed webhosting

[HermanAB]

That is what Squid-cache is for.

Re:Distributed webhosting

[Anonymous Coward]

No it isn't.

Re:Distributed webhosting

[Anonymous Coward]

No, that wouldn't make sense. The nice thing about BT is that you can distribute a file to lots of people without having the full bandwidth cost of delivering a full copy of that file to everybody who wants it. As such, it's great for large files. Extensive game mods, large applications, fan movies, and the like. A typical Web page is one to a few rather small files. If the torrent-web pages are going to persist, you need to have a seeder for each one (this doesn't scale) or you could have entire sites or large chunks of a site bundled together (makes updating the site a pain), plus the whole idea falls apart when you try to apply it to database driven sites (well, I suppose you could bundle in a script on the user side that gets results from the DB on a server, but then what's the point of doing this with BT?). BT is good at what it does, but extending it to the point that it is the Web browser is a stupid idea.

Re:Distributed webhosting

[rshoger]

I guess I wasnt the only one with this idea :) Fairly simple idea though, but I think there are a lot of subtleties in implementation to be thought out. Think about however, how strongly a distributed web server and access to files would go in to forming the basis of a community!

Re:Distributed webhosting

[ganhawk]

p2pbridge is a project that is aimed at using overlay networks to access web pages. Ofcourse, it doesnt work yet.

Dijer was a similar project that was launced sometime ago (I cant seem to find the homepage of that project)

But I guess in this case (where server is required to do work, not for just generate content), we need to write a P2P client that acts like both server and client for searches. In that case, we can just use one of the existing network like Gnutella with a distributed spider ?

Re:Distributed webhosting

[petermgreen]

a torrent-server (by which i mean something that can offer a whole tree of files by bittorrent) would be nice for one thing though and that is sites that host a lot of files which occasionally gets certain files hit big time (thing getting /.ed etc)

ie when one user is downloading a file at a time the torrent server just sends to them if a few people download the same file they help each other a bit but the server still does most of the work.

if a file gets /.ed the server restricts the bandwidth it offers for that one file and the torrent swarm takes over most of the load.

The real question

[John Seminal]

The official BitTorrent search has debuted. The search engine was built by BT inventor Bram Cohen. The question? Will he get sued?

Will this search engine help other websites get shut down?

I don't think the RIAA can sue the search engine, but it could sue sites that list torrents.

How will this search engine deal with private torrent websites?? Will it cache them? Can that be used as evidence at a later time?

Re:The real question

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

How long have torrents been illegal?

So fast!

[buckymatters]

BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google [Alpha 1]...fast.

elitetorrents is dead

[ilf]

ICE press release

dunno why my article got rejected...

ice?

[Anonymous Coward]

how is bittorrent immigration and/or customs?

Why should we?

[millennial]

1) It's redundant - who wants to have to use two P2P apps just to get something?

2) It's difficult - until recently, trackerless torrents have been a dream, so downloading a torrent from a random user might end up creating a bunch of seedless torrents.

3) Most people who use other P2P apps tend to not understand BitTorrent. They stick with what's easy.

A lawsuit may clear the air...

[Prospero's Grue]

I can't help but wonder if there's a provocation behind this - I guess techdirt thinks so. A legal examination and decision (through a lawsuit) might be just what's needed to clear the air of all the *AA FUD that's tossed around...ala SCO v. Linux case. ...or it may add to it, I suppose - lots of histrionics and propoganda while the wheels of justice grind. Is Grokster settled yet?

Re:A lawsuit may clear the air...

[PureFiction]

Is Grokster settled yet?

SCOTUS has not produced a formal decision yet. The outcome of that case will go a long way towards destroying or legitimizing these types of services.

cross your fingers...

Read the ToS

[Turn-X Alphonse]

Look at the ToS, it has some.. intresting stuff.

2. Online Conduct

You agree that you will not use the Site or the Services:

* to develop, generate, upload, post, display, transmit, disseminate or store information that: (A) infringes any third party's intellectual property or other proprietary rights, including, but not limited to, using third party copyrighted materials, without appropriate permission, using third party trademarks without appropriate permission or attribution, or using or distributing third party information (whether or not protected as a trade secret) in violation of a duty of confidentiality or otherwise; (B) is or, in BitTorrent's sole discretion, would have the tendency to be, defamatory, libelous, harassing, pornographic, an invasion of privacy, obscene, abusive, illegal, racist, offensive or harmful or otherwise objectionable; (C) constitutes unsolicited promotions, advertising or solicitations for funds, good or services, including junk mail and spam; (D) otherwise violates this Terms of Service in any way; or (E) obstructs or otherwise interferes with the normal performance of another person's use of the Sites or the Services;

Seems they are covering a few legal holes.. but will it stand against RIAA/MPAA's pack of lawyers?

Re:Read the ToS

[John Seminal]

Seems they are covering a few legal holes.. but will it stand against RIAA/MPAA's pack of lawyers?

No. It will not stand up to the RIAA/MPAA pack of lawyers. They have deep pockets. Who is funding this search engine website?

Secondly, The RIAA has their lobbyists. If current laws are insufficent to shut down the website, the lobbyists will get a new set of law passed. Did you know most of the laws that congress passes were written by lobbyists??

The question the OP asks is comprable to "Can Noriega defend himself from the USA?". We all know how that turned out. ;)

Re:Read the ToS

[uttaddmb]

No, it won't. Napster (the old Napster) did the same thing. Also, Boing Boing is reporting that Elite Torrents was just shut down by the FBI. I can't see this search engine going anywhere, unfortunately.

Re:Read the ToS

[Anonymous Coward]

What does the ToS say about IP logging and the use/dissemination of those logs? I, for one, will only visit these sites through a proxy service such as Proxify

Question

[millennial]

Why does the "news" link send you to MySearch, a well-known spyware-related site? Is this why they're planning to be sued?

Re:Question

[Anonymous Coward]

You're not by chance thinking of MyWebSearch are you? I know that site has been a pain in the ass for a lot of people, but I thought that MySearch was a legitimate site.

Re:Question

[millennial]

MySearch Spyware
About MySearch Spyware

MySearch is a browser hijack program implemented as IE toolbar. Besides providing search features, it also hijacks Internet Explorer homepage and searches, resetting them to point to its controlling server.

I think they're the same thing, actually.

Just use google?

[Rolozo]

You can always append filetype:torrent to your google searches. For example:

http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Atorrent+ ubuntu

Re:Just use google?

[Anonymous Coward]

> You can always append filetype:torrent to your google searches. For example:
> http://www.google.com/search?q=filetype%3Atorrent+ ubuntu

You didn't append it.
You prepended it.

Re:Just use google?

[TeknoHog]

Yes, but does Google analyze the contents of a torrent? For example, the filenames listed would be nice to search against.

what about GOOG

[sourabhkothari]

I wonder how the BT search is better than good old google search with filetype as .torrent.
If what the BT search enging does is simply crawl the web and index sites with .torrent files than... that's what google has been doing for yrs.

Same stuff with a new packaging...

Re:what about GOOG

[TeknoHog]

I would imagine BT search looks at the contents of a torrent, for instance extracting filenames that could be matched against search terms. Of course this is possible for Google as well, but I doubt that it's being done.

Re:what about GOOG

[notsoanonymouscoward]

sounds like a nice little project using the google API

Re:Legal Issues

[Sirdar Bey]

here's a site that was related to bittorrent:

http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/ap/200505 25/ap_on_hi_te/movie_downloading

They're getting more and more aggressive. They'll continue to attempt to crack down on each new technology as long as the main purpose is to share O.P.P.

I DEMAND Search API

[Space_Soldier]

Right now, it isn't working. Assuming that it would become the best torrent search engine, it would be nice if he would relase an API in order for BT clients to talk to it. If he doesn't, we can always parse the html, but that sucks.

I don't know how he plans to make money of it since it is a black-greyish area. You don't see Sony, Porche, etc. ads in the middle of a porn film.

Plus, some of us have AdBlock.

Evidence of editing on slashdot.

[jdgeorge]

BitTorrent search however proves with first tests [that it is] as...Google...fast. The results come from a large number [of] more well-known and unknown... sites, and...permits sufficient restricting to the inquiry, in order to obtain really relevant results.

Well, sure, the editing was done by starrsoft, who submitted the article, but I just about had a heart attack when I saw a slashdot article that had been edited to make it more comprehensible.

Re:Evidence of editing on slashdot.

[starrsoft]

Yep. *grin* That was me.

it doesn't work...

[flawedgeek]

Could someone post a torrent of this, please?

Now Maybe Finally

[Nom du Keyboard]

Now maybe finally can we move Slashdot to BT and harness the power of distributed computing to satisfy our insanely increasing needs to geek trivia?

Nothing new

[ravenspear]

Virtually every single P2P app and website that has ever existed has had TOS similar to this. In most cases the app/site creators know exactly what will be going on, but they have to put in this kind of language to make it look like they are not openly encouraging infringement.

Don't expect this to be any kind of legal shield though, because it isn't.

Re:Nothing new

[Travelsonic]

What about the inability to (easily or accurately) filter illegal content? -_0

Re:Nothing new

[red_kenotic]

Can't find the slashdot article about this now, but very similar thing...
http://www.towerseek.org/

http://search.bittorrent.com/search.jsp?hitsPerPag e=10&hitsPerSite=3&query=redhat&Submit2=Search%5D

http://www.towerseek.org/search.jsp?query=redhat%5 D

Snap?

Firefox Seach Plugin

[g-san]

God damn thats good service. It's already available. Kudos to Chad Walstrom! Click on File Sharing here.

We have a new expression: zero-day features!

Results so far

[Dark Paladin]

So, with stopwatch in hand, I thought I'd test out how well this works.

First search: "The Power of Nightmares".

Results: Timed Out

Second search: "Eyes on the Prize"

Results: Timed out

Third search: Don Quixote

Results: Timed out

Yup - working perfectly so far! M|R|F/IAA doesn't have anything to worry about!

Re:Porn search

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Empornium and PureTNA.

nice...

[Anonymous Coward]

Let's get this straight:

Debuted and Fast now encompases "does not work at all".

Slick.

I've just "debuted" a full on AI, then!

A retard wrote this story

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm used to second-class writing on Slashdot, but this is FREAKIN' RIDICULOUS. What is it with all the ellipses?

Wow

[Anonymous Coward]

A pre /.ed story! This will increase efficiency by 100%! This is better than the letterless keyboard!

Online Translators

[suwain_2]

they furnished rather durchwachsene [??] results.

Does anyone else find that phrase to nicely sum up the state of online translators? It's amazing that they can do as much as they do, but the results are sometimes a little, well, durchwachsene.

Re:Online Translators

[minus_273]

wellithinkthatuitisjustgerman hasnouseforspaces whatdoyouthinaboutit?

RE: Online Translators

[sethadam1]

What's your beef? It's a perfectly cromulent word!

Re:Online Translators

[Anonymous Coward]

suwain_2 :: quality slashdot postings since 200

I find your claim somewhat unlikely.

I, for one, ...

[Maljin Jolt]

...welcome their furnished rather durchwachsene results.

Re:Legal Issues (OPP)

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, I feel the need to say that I was never "down with OPP," although I really did like the bassline in that song at the time. Wow, that brings back memories.

Second, I have the question the usefulness of a technology whose main purpose is to share a 15 year old rap song. *8-|*(wtf)

The question is

[digitalgimpus]

Will he withstand a slashdotting of his new gem?

I'm guessing no, searches are already broken.

Day #1, and slashdot is already attacking you.

At least there's a lot of publicity in that.

Will they get sued?

[whib]

Getting sued will likely have very little to do with the viability of legal action.

Any potential legal action will likely be more of an attempt to intimidate, or for the plaintif to flex their muscles. Given that recent rash of lawsuits against torrent sites, I'm going to assume that those who may sue will watch the site to find out what sort of traffic it will generate, what sort of usage the site will get. If the site is not getting any traffic anyhow, the odds of getting sued are pretty low.

Interesting that he picked today

[Otto]

Today is a strange day to do it, considering that EliteTorrents just got shut down by the FBI and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Inital breaking story where the webpage appeared to be hacked: http://www.slyck.com/news.php?story=801
FBI Release: http://www.fbi.gov/dojpressrel/pressrel05/bittorre nt052505.htm
ICE release: http://www.ice.gov/graphics/news/newsreleases/arti cles/starwars052505.htm
MPAA Release: http://mpaa.org/MPAAPress/2005/2005_05_25b.doc

Re:Interesting that he picked today

[corsec67]

From the FBI release-

"The theft of copyrighted material is far from a victimless crime," said Assistant Director Reigel of the FBI. "When thieves steal this data, they are taking jobs away from hard workers in industry, which adversely impacts the U.S. economy."

Even the assistant director of the FBI doesn't know the difference between theft and copyright infringement.

Re:Interesting that he picked today

[Travelsonic]

"The theft of copyrighted material is far from a victimless crime,"

Re:Interesting that he picked today

[Travelsonic]

That should have read:

"The theft of copyrighted material is far from a victimless crime,"

"far from a victimless crime"? Try not even a crime. If there is anything these people are doing, it's COPYRIGHT INFRINGEMENT. Imagin the balls these people, GOVERNMENT OFFICIALS, have by calling a crime that hollywood invented, one that is not only a splicing of a real crime, but a mis-representation of a real crime.

About time

[lahuard]

I hope its not to broad and not too full of ads tho

RTJKJAS

[Anonymous Coward]

This is slightly off topic, but anyone notice the red text at the bottom of http://elitetorrents.org/? What does RTJKJAS mean? RIP Elite Torrents

Owner of torrent website was just arrested

[John Seminal]

http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/crime_starwars_dc

The Elite Torrents network, found online at www.elitetorrents.org, relied on a technology called BitTorrent that allows users to quickly download digital movies and other large files by copying them from many computers at once.

The network signed up 133,000 members who collectively downloaded 2.1 million files, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Homeland Security Department.

Visitors to the Web site on Wednesday saw a notice that read, "This site has been permanently shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement."

What makes this so amazing is, this was not shut down because the RIAA sued, or because they made threats. The FBI raided the house, arrested the owner, and shut the website down. I wonder what the FBI will do with the server logs??

This has to be the dumbest waste of taxpayer money ever. Lets go after places that share music and tv shows.

Re:Owner of torrent website was just arrested

[mrsev]

..well. How about not hosting your site in the US of A.

That should make it at least a little harder to let the FBI shut you down!

Re:Owner of torrent website was just arrested

[Anonymous Coward]

Ah yes, the standard slashbot "WTF, The fbi/government isn't going after real criminals today! They must be devoting 100% of their resources on catching warzers! How dare they catch those who infringe copy rights, why don't they just do some *real work* and let us download all these movies/games/songs/etc for free?"

The secret plan of Cohen

[Anonymous Coward]

He always said BitTorrent was never intended for distribution of illegal files, yet it is used for it. Maybe he finally had enough of the abuse of his protocol? Maybe he just created a search engine so the illeagal torrents could be found and shut down?
What other reason could there be?

Well the real question would be how his searchengine gets its data about the torrents.
I doubt that it crawls the web in search of trackers and I am pretty sure it is not part of the current protocol to "call home". Or, is it?

All right that should be enough to get the conspiracy theories going.

On the keeping one step ahead of 'The Man'

[Haiku 4 U]

This search engine might
prevent this from being seen
everywhere. Or not.

Re:On the keeping one step ahead of 'The Man'

[kwandar]

Will the owners of elitetorrents have their day in court, suing the FBI and Customs for using their name? I've always wondered on what basis law enforcment felt they had the right to make use of property. Its either evidence, in which case it should be preserved, or its the property of the owners, in which case they should keep their hands off, at least until a decision is rendered by a Court.

"legally dubious"

[Penguinoflight]

Remember that not all the world has bought into the united states lame idea of intellectual property, and anti innovation laws. IDK where bittorrent.com is being hosted, but if they get bothered by the MPAA, they'll probably just go to Denmark or Switzerland where information is still free.

Re:"legally dubious"

[josh3736]

Actually, I'd like to take this opportunity to point out that in the US, Copyright is NOT a moral right (as it is in most of Europe); rather it is a (Constitutionally-granted) temporary monopoly over distribution. This is a very important distinction to note because if I own the copyright to some creative work, my control over that work extands only as far as distribution is concerned. After that, I have no legal standing to dictate how you use my work. For example, if I were to use a picture of Jar-Jar as toilet paper, George can't sue me for violating the intregrity of his work. However, if George did have moral rights over his work, he could sue me.

Essentially, what it comes down to is under US law, the creator gets more of a 'licence' to his work whereas in other countries his creative works are treated like real property. This is why the bastardized term "Intellectual Property" really pisses me off--there exists no intellectual property in the US. Creators have no moral right to their property. As much as some corporate interests would love complete control of their "Property," their protections are bestowed to them by the Constitution and the Constitution only.

Re:"legally dubious"

[cpt kangarooski]

1) It's not granted by the Constitution, it's granted by act of Congress. The Constitution merely empowers Congress to do so. (And to some extent, states can and have and do grant copyrights as well)

2) Copyright covers more than distribution. See, e.g. 17 USC 106.

Re:"legally dubious"

[BranMan]

Copyright BEGAN as a temporary monopoly over copying and distribution. However, recently it also gives the copyright holder control over derivative works - the toilet paper with Jar-Jar on it would be a derivative work, as is any other story set in the Star Wars 'universe' or using it's characters or storyline.

Also, Intellectual Property includes copyrights, trade secrets, patents, trademarks, even overall 'style' in some cases. So it's pretty broad.

As for moral rights - our copyright law now basically includes them too ,with the provisions about derivative works, but allows them to be assigned to another (which the European version is not).

google

[Anonymous Coward]

so, um, whats the catch here.. just use google with 'appropriate search term' and 'torrent'. gives tons of links to the file in question which work as well (or not)

suprnova is dead, long live mininova.org

[MrJones]

I don't know why suprnova shut itself down, but right now, www.mininova.org looks a suprnova like it should be in the first place.

btw, the search in the BT site is down now.

IsoHunt and TorrentSpy didn't have any problems?

[Jugalator]

Naturally other sites such as Bitoogle, Isohunt, SuprNova or Torrentspy have tried before, but either they became fast a goal of legal attacks on the part of the industry or they furnished rather durchwachsene [??] results.

I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to say, but both IsoHunt and TorrentSpy deliver excellent results and definitely fulfilling their purpose, and they're fully functional today.

Unrealmac??

[Anonymous Coward]

What happened to unrealmac.com?

www.elitetorrents.org shut down by the feds

[alex_guy_CA]

Since we are on the topic, here is a Yahoo article about the feds getting all nasty on a torrent site. http://news.yahoo.com/s/nm/crime_starwars_dc

From the article: U.S. law enforcers said on Wednesday that they have shut down a computer network that distributed illegal copies of "Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith" before it appeared in movie theaters.

Federal agents executed 10 search warrants and seized the main server computer in a network that allowed people to download nearly 18,000 movies and software programs, including many current releases, the FBI and Homeland Security Department said.

The Elite Torrents network, found online at www.elitetorrents.org, relied on a technology called BitTorrent that allows users to quickly download digital movies and other large files by copying them from many computers at once.

The network signed up 133,000 members who collectively downloaded 2.1 million files, according to the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division of the Homeland Security Department.

Visitors to the Web site on Wednesday saw a notice that read, "This site has been permanently shut down by the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement."

That's a terrible analogy, here's a more accurate

[silsor]

It'd be more like getting arrested for producing a phone book that along with legitimate pharmacologists lists drug dealers, the type of drugs they sell, and the relative quality of their drugs along with a button that you can press to have the drugs mailed to your house.

Timed out...

[Anonymous Coward]

Pretty shitty launch I must say.

empornium sucks

[Anonymous Coward]

except you cant actually sign up for empornium

OOPS

Re:empornium sucks

[WhatAmIDoingHere]

Funny, I signed up and have an account.

That's like saying "You can't get an account at torrentbytes.

You can, just not right now.

The law is strong with this one

[saddino]

Will he get sued?

Someone will.

Seems to me this makes it much easier to go after those who link to torrents, though I suppose the jury is still out on the legality of linking to copyrighted material.

"Contributory infringement"

[Anonymous Coward]

Many have warned of dire legal consequences for the bittorent web search engine operators. I had thought that the concept of "contributory infringement" infringement had been debunked in the US legal system, by the Sony VCR ruling (sorry, Idon't know the name of that case).

Can any legal begals reading this please explain this issue in laymans terms?

I know

[uchi]

I know what I am going to do. I will search for "sith" and then download that torrent from the top 10 results. That has to be a good idea!

Homeland Security?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why does the warning banner include the spiffy-new Homeland Security logo?

1) They're tracking potential terrorist attacks with fuel-filled florescent tubes.

2) They're expanding and abusing the so-called Patriot Act powers to go after issues completely unrelated to terrorism.

It seems to me .gov needs a kick in the a$$.

Lets have a poll

[Snaller]

How long will the site be up? (Not counting slashdotting):

1 Day
1 Week
2 Weeks
1 Month
It's a ploy by the MPAA!

Re:IsoHunt and TorrentSpy didn't have any problems

[mattkinabrewmindspri]

I agree with that. Isohunt, in particular, seems to be giving me much better results than this new bittorrent.com search.

Plus Google is mo better

[jmorris42]

Just tried searching for "Revenge of the Sith" on bittorrent's new search engine and "filetype:torrent Revenge of the Sith" on Google. Google wins hands down for number of hits. Two hits on BT's search and three pages on Google.

Re:Plus Google is mo better

[mzieg]

Hey, that's cool. I confess, I'd stupidly assumed that Google's "filetype:" parameter would only accept those same "enum" values as the SELECT box on their Advanced Search page. I had no idea it supported arbitrary extentions. Neat. Thanks!

Re:Plus Google is mo better

[Yocto Yotta]

Keep in mind that that the BitTorrent engine is going to show you two specific torrents. Google shows you those same two torrents, albiet listed (likely even just referenced and not linked) on dozens of websites. I think Brahm is gosh darn crazy having a hand in this, but as an avid torrent downl- err, 'content browser,'- it's seems as efficient as using several sites to find one particular thing.

Re:Plus Google is mo better

[earthstar]

You guys planning to get Google shutdown or what !

Re:Plus Google is mo better

[AmVidia HQ]

http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Revenge+of+the+S ith%22+filetype:torrent&sourceid=opera&num=25&ie=u tf-8&oe=utf-8
74 results likely with duplicates

http://search.bittorrent.com/search.jsp?query=Reve nge+of+the+Sith&Submit2=Search
18 results assumably with no duplicates

http://isohunt.com/torrents.php?ihq=%22Revenge+of+ the+Sith%22
229 results with no duplicates, and combined tracker listings of torrents from multiple sites

A big error...

[giacomo-b]

In the last days bt was blamed just for allowing users to download illegal material from other sites (just like blaming a vcr recorder for allowing you to sell copied cassettes)...

I cannot imagine what is going to happen now, as you can find links to illegal torrents even on the bt homepage...

Perhaps Bram Cohen knows well what he's doing... But I think that this is a big error...

The end of bt is near?!? No, bt is opensource...
Bram is just going to jail for quite a long time :-)

Lame

[Anonymous Coward]

Haha. It does the same thing as ahref=http://torrentsearch.com/http://torrentsearc h.com/> or http://torrents.us/!

What the **AA will do...

[Morosoph]

Is use the search engine themselves.

Bram's really handed them a gift: if I ran a torrent site, I would not want it listed!

More recently sites like Suprnova and BTefnet, who provide no copyrighted content but do provide information on where to get it in the form of trackers, have been subject to successful legal action.

The sites are that have been sued have been a lot easier to take down: usually they've solicited for torrents and seeders, which means that there is clearly demonstratable intent: "aiding and abetting" in UK law. Bram's intent is more clearly to provide information upon what exists in the world; he's likey to be protected, but copyright infringers aren't the only ones who'll find it useful.

Another good torrent search site...

[xtracto]

Usually I use:
TorrentTyphoon or ibonsai
to search torrents, they are quite good.

Site will always be slow

[bazooka_foo]

it is jsp

No seeds / peers stats

[anime_layer]

Took some time to load thre results (page loading is fast but searching is slow). Looks quite ok in that it has a clean interface without tons of ads. However, there is one major flaw: No seeds / peers stats. You only get a "Speed Estimate" which was for all of the torrents my search returned: "Fast". It was a search I recently did on IsoHunt and the results may have been seeded but only with a few (less than 10) seeds and peers. This is far from being "fast" in my opinion.
This also leads to the question how often the data is updated. Since no actual seed / peer stats are displayed, I guess the database is update not that often. The other torrent search sites aren't updated that often, either but it seems to me that the official bittorrent search is updated even more seldomly.
This pretty much makes it uninteresting for me. I want to know how many seeds and peers a torrent has so I can judge the speed to expect and how long the torrent will still be alive. A loose term like "Fast" doesn't cut it for me in that case.

Parent is NOT offtopic!

[Anonymous Coward]

This is not offtopic. One search opens the same day another very popular torrent search site closes. Sounds topical to me!

To warm up their guns

[krelian]

The ??AA can try to sue emugle which has been up for sometime now and functions as a search engine for the edonkey network. A network that, perhaps less useful for legal P2P, is still the worlds most popular P2P network.
The problem (not a really a problem in my view) is that this network is mainly used (and also based ?) in Europe, where it might be a little bit harder for the ??AA to throw it's menacing claws also known as lawyers.
I am sure that the ultimate goal would be to get rid of of all P2P search engines but if they are going to start with bitTorrent is will be funny that the first truly "evil" service will remain while the "Not really evil but could be used for evil purposes" service will go away.

Good Meat?

[Vagary]

But isn't meat marbled with fat more moist with a good mouth-feel and considered superior by Western palates than low-fat meat or meat with hunks of fat?

cool!

[metroplex]

Wow, the site does work fast! I typed in my torrent search and the website instantaneously returned me these interesting and useful results!

HTTP Status 500 -

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

javax.servlet.ServletExce ption [and so on]

Certainly unlike any of the annoying durchwachsene results I'm used to!

Cool...

[sunwolf]

A quick search for the innocent word "Cool" leads to the first result being...

Be.Cool.DVDSCR.XviD-DoNE from thepiratebay.org

I don't know about you, but that seems like an invitation to a picnic in the courtroom to me...and the MPAA won't be bringing sandwiches.

Crazy

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds like a really dumb, really crazy idea.

Of course the founder of Bittorrent is a schizophrenic, so I shouldn't be suprised.

Search for porn:

[Anonymous Coward]

HTTP Status 500 - type Exception report message description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request. exception javax.servlet.ServletException at org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.handlePa geException(PageContextImpl.java:498) at org.apache.jsp.search_jsp._jspService(search_jsp.j ava:658) at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(Http JspBase.java:92) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.servic e(JspServletWrapper.java:162) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFil e(JspServlet.java:240) at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspSe rvlet.java:187) at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.in ternalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:200) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.ac cess$000(ApplicationFilterChain.java:51) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain$1. run(ApplicationFilterChain.java:129) at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method) at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.do Filter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:125) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invo ke(StandardWrapperValve.java:209) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invo ke(StandardContextValve.java:144) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.invoke(St andardContext.java:2358) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke( StandardHostValve.java:133) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorDispatcherValve.in voke(ErrorDispatcherValve.java:118) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:594) at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke (ErrorReportValve.java:116) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:594) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invok e(StandardEngineValve.java:127) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596) at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433) at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948) at org.apache.coyote.tomcat4.CoyoteAdapter.service(Co yoteAdapter.java:152) at org.apache.jk.server.JkCoyoteHandler.invo

Couldn't Resist

[NoizeyMike]

Operation D-Elite is being conducted jointly by ICE and the FBI as part of the Computer And Technology Crime High Tech Response Team ("CATCH"), a San Diego task force of specially trained prosecutors and law enforcement officers who focus on high-tech crime.

Grooooooove is in the heeaarrttttt... aieeee aieeee aieeeee.

Grrroooooove is the heartttt.. aieee aiee aieeeee.

errr. i'm sorry I don't know what came over me..

Any sites for legal video?

[BeBoxer]

Are there any sites which have torrents to legal video? I would think the Prelinger Archives for example would be interested in BitTorrent. Looking at the current home page shows the top downloads totalling in the neighborhood of 1,000,000 downloads at maybe 10MB a piece. That's a significant bandwidth charge there. It would be nice to be able to easily find alternative video to watch in lieu of the MPAA's crap.

The feds can actually use this to combat piracy

[thisisauniqueid]

This is not probably something he should be sued over. Bittorrent Search could actually be used by the feds to combat piracy, by discovering where illegal torrents are located. (Should Xerox PARC employees be sued over inventing the ethernet, because it is now used to traffick illegal warez?)

A different but related moral question, which may not have the same answer: should anybody that writes file sharing software feel bad when their code is used to share nasty stuff?

Re:The feds can actually use this to combat piracy

[Anonymous Coward]

No No! Let's sue Al Gore for inventing the internet. :)

Google Adsense

[Zepalesque]

I see they've included Google AdSense to their search results.

They may be able to make enough money to pay for the lawsuit.

Re:Speedy The Drug Dealer

[Tiger4]

"Could I be taken to court for telling people that Joe Bloggs on the other side of town can put them in touch with someone who will give them [illegal item] - I wouldn't think so"

They picked up several dozen people at my high school for doing exactly that.

In that case it was a drug sting operation, but the principle is the same. If you tell me about a friend of a friend that can get me weed/pills/blow, you go to jail for facillitation. Why would that not also be true of warez and music/movies?

List me!

[Unnamed Chickenheart]

"I could go on, but I think you get the point."

I got the point; but I'd like you to go on! :)

That may be the purpose.

[Denyer]

As others have pointed out, it would lend legitimacy to BitTorrent through a form of self-policing -- particularly if a specialised BT search spider becomes more reliable a centralised source for finding torrents than Google.

Right, but wrong

[Sycraft-fu]

Right that a lawsuit against him probably won't be successful, but for the wrong reasons.

The real reason is that Bittorrent has a substantial, demonstrated non-infringing use. It is very widely used for legitimate distrubtion of data. These days, it's hard to get some OSS things without using bittorrent, major sites like 3dgamers.com use it as their prefered method of distribution, people use it to aleviate /.ing, Blizzard uses it to distribute World of Warcraft patches, and so on.

So not only is it clear that Bittorrent can be used for legit uses, it's clear that it is on a very wide scale.

That's where Napster lost out. Though, in theory, Napster could have legit uses, in practise it didn't. Sure there were a token amount of legit files floating around on it, but it was just a token showing, mostly to try and point to and say "See! There's legit use!"

Not the case with Bittorrent, the legit use is massive. Even on sites like Suprnova, that had infringing listings as well, you'd find Linux ISOs listed, and there were tons of people downloading and seeding them.

Re:Right, but wrong

[cpt kangarooski]

Though, in theory, Napster could have legit uses, in practise it didn't.

So? The Sony opinion only required that technology be capable of substantial noninfringing uses. It didn't require them to actually be.

As it happens, Napster was successful in arguing that it should be protected by the Sony precedent. The problem was that that didn't give them blanket protection -- it only meant that the capability of the network for infringement couldn't be used against them to impute knowledge of infringement.

The RIAA was easily able to demonstrate that they had knowledge for other reasons, and so they still won.

Google results

[nurb432]

Depending on your criteria, google returns more then 50% of its reults as links to 'infringing' content.

Google Buyout

[bobaferret]

How long before Google Aquires this service. I personally Think it would be great. Make some money for the BT guy and give Google another interesting service.

google css template

[thelost]

er, is there a google css template floating around the web because it seems to have been employed on bittorrent.com. I need it too to ensure my website is successful!

Google helps pirates too

[mcryptic]

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=star+wars+sit h+torrent&btnG=Google+Search

Certainly the FBI should shutdown google.

It Helps the RIAA Too

[Comatose51]

If I was the RIAA, I wouldn't sue the search engine. Instead, I would use it to find any tracker stupid enough to post to the search engine and go after those guys. Knowing this, I doubt most illegal torrent trackers will allow searches from this site, unless of course you happen to be Pirate Bay, who've been defying the **AA for sometime now.

Re:This is Useless

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes. Which means whoever modded you -1 is a total n00b.

Why not offer a .torrent file that's an index ?

[bergeron76]

Why not offer a .torrent file that's an index of the torrents?

BitTorrent.com is also using filetype:torrent!

[imtheguru]

I'm surprised that in 150 odd posts, no one has bothered to check the page source.

from http://bittorrent.com
(emphasis mine)

function sendheader(searchtype) {
var searchstr = document.search.searchtxt.value;
if (document.search.rdfile.checked == true) {
--------> searchstr = searchstr+" filetype:torrent"; <--------
document.search.action = "http://ms128.mysearch.com/jsp/GGmain.jsp?searchfo r="+searchstr;
document.search.submit();
}

So, BitTorrent search is using MySearch.com to perform 'filetype:torrent' searches. This also explains the presence of the MySearch news links.

Re:BitTorrent.com is also using filetype:torrent!

[moonbender]

That javascript isn't ever refered to in the body of the page. It's never called. At least not as far as I can see. The form certainly doesn't. Maybe it's an artifact of the development or something.

Illegal stuff

[TwistedSpring]

Well, a search for Psychonauts, Tim Schafer's excellent new game, produced only one legitimate torrent for the demo but a whole bunch of torrents for the full thing.

I don't really see how a site that allows you to merely search for files can be considered illegal (otherwise Google would have to be shut down immediately), but since this site is made by the little guys and it allows searching for those evil .torrent things it'll probably get targetted. Torrent and Terrorist both start with 'T'. Coincidence? I think not!

Search results?

[Anonymous Coward]

I searched for "brubeck" and got one result for "Guitar Pro 4 Full +serial" :S

Slightly off topic but I am curious...

[shaitand]

Has anyone investigated the possibility for using bittorrent exploits to utilize peers as a zombie network for dos attacks and such? The bandwidth is massive and the pcs are already willfully connected together...

Deja Vu!

[jay_highlands]

This torrent seach engine looks the exact same as http://www.towerseek.org/, it even throws up the same errors! I can't see anything on both of the sites that suggest that they are the same project. Does anyone have some ideas if they are the same?

durchwachsene

[sweetnjguy29]

Search results for -- Suchergebnisse für 'durchwachsene':

marbled -- durchwachsen (Fleisch)
streaky -- durchwachsen (Speck)

from a german online dictionary at : http://www.iee.et.tu-dresden.de/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/we rnerr/search.sh

Re:durchwachsene

[elander]

Metaphore for "mixed" in this context.

it's not the hosting company

[Anonymous Coward]

IT's the webserver it's running.
http://search.bittorrent.com/search.jsp?query=open bsd&Submit2=Search
-----

HTTP Status 500 -

type Exception report

message

description The server encountered an internal error () that prevented it from fulfilling this request.

exception

javax.servlet.ServletException
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.PageContextImpl.handlePa geException(PageContextImpl.java:498)
at org.apache.jsp.search_jsp._jspService(search_jsp.j ava:659)
at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(Http JspBase.java:92)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853)
at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.servic e(JspServletWrapper.java:162)
at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFil e(JspServlet.java:240)
at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspSe rvlet.java:187)
at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet .java:853)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.in ternalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:200)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.ac cess$000(ApplicationFilterChain.java:51)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain$1. run(ApplicationFilterChain.java:129)
at java.security.AccessController.doPrivileged(Native Method)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.do Filter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:125)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardWrapperValve.invo ke(StandardWrapperValve.java:209)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContextValve.invo ke(StandardContextValve.java:144)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardContext.invoke(St andardContext.java:2358)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardHostValve.invoke( StandardHostValve.java:133)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:596)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorDispatcherValve.in voke(ErrorDispatcherValve.java:118)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:594)
at org.apache.catalina.valves.ErrorReportValve.invoke (ErrorReportValve.java:116)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline$Standard PipelineValveContext.invokeNext(StandardPipeline.j ava:594)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardPipeline.invoke(S tandardPipeline.java:433)
at org.apache.catalina.core.ContainerBase.invoke(Cont ainerBase.java:948)
at org.apache.catalina.core.StandardEngineValve.invok e(StandardEngineValve.java:127)

Anyone Notice its NOT WORKING

[Jaffanator]

Hmm, as I can see from the next article posted on slashdot, the FBI is working quickly these days.

But I didn't think they were going quite this quickly.

Ive got an idea

[Anonymous Coward]

The BT search is down because its hosted on a single server. so they could just make the search process distributed between all the users themself somehow....

oh...

Fast like Google?

[dtfinch]

I don't think we've ever managed to /. Google.

Throw your Metallica stuff in the garbage

[Anonymous Coward]

But now that you've thrown it away (it's destroyed, presumably), this cannot happen, and now somebody will have to buy new Metallica shit, lining Lars' pockets with even more gold.


Maybe you're not familiar with the argument that the sale of used cars, for example, makes new cars more valuable - it gives them resale value.

I've read Cory Doctorow argue on BoingBoing that the newly enlarged used books market (thanks to Amazon, eBay, half.com) is doing the same thing for new books, like so:

- New book unit sales are way DOWN, but...
- Used book sales are way up.
- New book prices are up (books are more
valuable b/c they now have more resale value).
- New book revenues are up.

So authors shouldn't be upset about the expanded used book market, as many apparently are - so the argument goes.

I'm no economist, I don't know how much of this really makes sense. But it seems to me that by destroying his old Metallica stuff and not selling it, the original poster could be helping to prevent the development of a robust used-Metallica-stuff aftermarket, thus putting downward pressure on Metallica-stuff prices and helping to deflate new Metallica-stuff revenues.

Re:Throw your Metallica stuff in the garbage

[nugneant]

I'm no economist, I don't know how much of this really makes sense. But it seems to me that by destroying his old Metallica stuff and not selling it, the original poster could be helping to prevent the development of a robust used-Metallica-stuff aftermarket, thus putting downward pressure on Metallica-stuff prices and helping to deflate new Metallica-stuff revenues.

Yeah, because that sure killed off the baseball card collecting industry. And the coin collectiong industry. Not to mention the ancient Greek text collecting industry.

Hypothetical situation A: Metallica releases 1000 copies of its last album before being destroyed in an Act of God.
In the post-apocalyptic world, 1000 people remain. There are enough Metallica albums to satisfy the needs of everyone on Earth, so prices are quite likely in the neighborhood of ten cigarette butts.

Hypothetical situation B: Metaliica releases 1000 copies of its last album before being destroyed in an Act of God. However, smarty anonymous cowards convince the hot tempered to destroy all but 5 copies.
In the post-apocalyptic world, 1000 people remain. There are only 5 Metallica albums to satisfy the needs of those people. Likely, they will trade for many many cigarette butts, more than you could ever smoke so don't bother starting. Metallica's status is legendary.

While this is a bit far fetched and the numbers do require a bit of fudging (this assumes 5% of all people alive on earth are Metallica fans who really really really want lots of Metallica stuff, a standard / equal distribution of survivors, and the loss of all CD burners along the way), it holds up. Baseball card collectors treat Honus Wagner as a special meme, the way the media treats Barry Bonds. Yes, he's a hall of famer - along with more others than I can count. He's no Mickey Mantle, Babe Ruth, or even Christy "huh?" Matthewson. But because his card in the T-206 set sells for Wayne Gretzky prices, he still has his token honorfame.

I'm no economist either, I just think more than you ;)

What if Google spiders infringing content?

[Anonymous Coward]

If you put the full text of a copyrighted book up on your website (and you don't have permission from the copyright holder), then you are infringing copyright.

If google then spiders your site and caches all that text, then *google* is also infringing copyright.

It's not willful infringement, but they'd still have to remove the content from their caches on request or they'd be fair game for a lawsuit.

IANAL, and if I'm wrong about this I'd love to hear a lawyerly explanation of why.

RIAA: Driving technological innovation

[squidinkcalligraphy]

Sure, it's a cat and mouse game, but without RIAA and such, true peer-to-peer networking would still be in the stoneage. Witness: KaZaa, gnutella, BT, freenet, and now the forthcoming distributed search (freenet style distributed has table) for BT.

Thanks RIAA!

I don't think he'll get sued...

[EmagGeek]

First of all, let's look at the difference between bittorrent and previous p2p applications.

BitTorrent (until today) was a simplified, stripped down way of sharing files and directories. There is practically no UI, no search function, and it was really geared more towards software distribution.

Today, there is WAY too much demonstrable legal use of BitTorrent to make the claim that it was created for the sole purpose of distributing copyrighted works without authorization. The only thing I am concerned about is that the search component will turn up more illegal results, making this point less profound. If the creation of the search tool demonstrates that there is more illegal use, we may have a problem.

Re:I don't think he'll get sued...

[Ziviyr]

Today, there is WAY too much demonstrable legal use of BitTorrent to make the claim that it was created for the sole purpose of distributing copyrighted works without authorization.

I wouldn't have guessed after trying a few searches on bittorrent.com.

Bittorrent usage will have to change, radically, if it is to look like something other than a pirate net from the searching end...

Know of any search terms that don't flood the screen with illegal crap?

Re:I don't think he'll get sued...

[EmagGeek]

I just used the search engine for the first time.. .and... sadly... you seem to be correct... lots of illegal returns on bittorrent.com...

They also claim high relevancy, but even searching on "RedHat Linux" does not return what I want... hrmmm

Where is the Functionality!!!

[bWareiWare.co.uk]

Shortly this is just the same as googling with "filetype:torrent"?
The whole point of P2P is that it works best when everyone is downloading from the same source. Shouldn't the job of a dedicated torrent search be to find the most active (i.e. fastest downloading) torrents of each file?
At least it could tell you the number of active users and current though-put so you had some idea of which ones were better.

Re:Where is the Functionality!!!

[robnauta]

Yes, the whole bittorrent search is a joke, and a big anticlimax.
Many people had anticipated a large search site backed by a large database of torrents, filled by indexing all known torrent sites.
Instead it is blindly obvious by reading the page source, that it's just a one-page site that takes your input, adds filetype:torrent and passes that to an external search engine (mysearch.com but it could just as well be google).
The whole thing is a joke of a site anyway, after a day most people will realise they can just as well go to google directly and type the filetype:torrent themselves, and get the same barely useful results much faster.

Not that useful ...

[robnauta]

I did a quick test: a search for CSI Miami
Sure, you get a screen full of results, but almost all are on tvtorrents.tv, btefnet.net, torrentchannel.com etc, and as you know those sites were taken down. Clicking on those torrents just gives you host not found, a this domain is parked page, and one on torrentchannel.com game me a screen full of hardcore porn ! Ouch, I'm at work guys, don't do that
So on its debut its content is already severely outdated.

durchwachsene

[Anonymous Coward]

From dictionary.com:

No entry found for durchwachsene.
Did you mean dishwashing?

Suggestions:
dishwashing
dishwashings
dishwas hing's
dishwashings'

No entry was found in the dictionary. Would you like to search the Web for durchwachsene?

For better results, try our search tips.

Perhaps you could get your news from someone who actually speaks English?

mmmm.... Seedless Torrents.....

[anarmyofnone]

delicous!

Lawyer's are now happy

[cylcyl]

they can search for p2p sites to sue faster than ever before!

Re:Speedy The Drug Dealer

[A beautiful mind]

If someone is fairly competent in maths, it can be quickly realised that by five-six steps, you can build a link between ANY POSSIBLE two humans on this planet living at the moment (that is if we assume that most humans knows 50 other human at least).

The sentencing despide the above mathematical fact is just plain ridicoulus. A set composed from the friends of a friends of a friends of a friends of mine are all criminals on this planet. Go arrest me if i tell about them...(i know, i didn't refer to an accurate description of drug dealing, but i believe the reasoning still stands for the same. Unless you a.) sell the drug yourself, b.) have anything to do with the trafficking of the drug (ie, marketing it) then you are perfectly innocent.)

Just another Yotoshi / Bitoogle rip off

[Anonymous Coward]

it looks to me that its just the same thing as yotoshi or bitoogle but slower.
Bitoogle the Original BT search site
yotoshi the improved BT search site
both sites are way faster and more stable

Re:Speedy The Drug Dealer

[Tiger4]

This is way late, but...

The crime here is not that you know someone that knows someone that is a criminal. That sort of progression may very well cover a huge fraction of the earth's population.

The crime is in knowingly putting someone in contact with someone else for a criminal purpose. That sort of thing has the flavor of criminal conspiracy. This is not a case of, "let me introduce you to Joe, a guy I barely know through a third person", this is "let me introduce you to Joe, a guy I'm pretty sure can supply you with the illegal products you were actively soliciting for just a momement ago". It has those two great legal requirements, active participation and guilty knowledge.

In the legitimate business world it would be known as a sales referral, and you might get a finder's fee for doing it. Same goes for crimnals (I guess).