Comments on: Reproducers & Scrapers – Legal or Illegal?

By: DPS David

DPS David — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 17:55:09 +0000

Well yes, that is also an issue, and I’m most definitely not saying that they are in the right, just playing devils advocate and seeing it from both sides.

In the past, sites such as The Pirate Bay have said that it is impossible to manually filter user submissions due to the sheer number of them and it isn’t technically possible to implement an automated filtering system.

Evidently, sites such as The Pirate Bay aren’t likely to have dedicated any time to these issues, as this would be counterproductive to their popularity.

By: Ben Stones

Ben Stones — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 17:52:08 +0000

Hi David,

But I think under the law The Pirate Bay (as well as anyone else) has a responsibility to remove material on their service if it is facilitating the infringement of copyright law and they have been notified about this. Well, definitely if the court declares the material in violation of copyright law ;).

By: DPS David

DPS David — Sat, 07 Jul 2012 09:59:52 +0000

Yes, I would tend to agree. For example, if we consider the following situation: a terrorist makes a bomb and plants it in a shopping centre. They escape and the bomb explodes killing many people. Now it isn’t an adequate defence for that terrorist to say ‘well it wasn’t me that killed everyone, it was the bomb’. While in language terms that is a correct statement, in legal terms, had it not been for that terrorist making and planting the bomb, those people wouldn’t have died. So therefore that is the reason why I think legally the creators of reproducers & scrapers are held responsible. And if they’re not, they should be. And it is most definitely amoral.

Yes, The Pirate Bay is a very complex issue. I can see it from both sides. On the one side they are facilitating copyright infringement. On the other side, I guess they would say, as you rightly pointed out Ben, a) they don’t host the copyrighted content. I also think they would say b) the don’t even create the torrent files to the copyrighted content, these are user generated and uploaded and c) If users stopped sharing copyrighted content that they didn’t have a right to share, then there would be no issue.

It’s definitely a very complex issue and I’m sure there will be many more twists and turns in The Pirate Bay saga before its over.

By: Ben Stones

Ben Stones — Fri, 06 Jul 2012 23:38:22 +0000

While I’m not a lawyer (nor is this guaranteed to be correct at all), I would assume that you would be legally responsible for creating an application that facilitates copyright infringement? What does The Pirate Bay do? Don’t they simply facilitate the ability to infringe on the intellectual property rights of another under copyright law? Because no copyrighted material is stored on servers owned by the The Pirate Bay; all that is stored on their servers are essentially data to be able to download the entire package of a torrent from multiple users. Hence, in this case, my conclusion to what The Pirate Bay are doing is nothing more than facilitating the infringement of copyright and I would assume it is in violation of British law to knowingly facilitate copyright infringement.