Hi, I am not new here. I have been spying on this forum a while, but never had the chance to sign up. I recently created a forum for the purpose of file trading and I am wondering if this is illegal. No files are hosted on our website, but users get to post softwares, movies, mp3. etc. Thank you tut
Yes, you can say warez forums even linking is not okay...If you are in US you can get into big troubles I highly recommend you not to open these types of forums Thanks, Saad
Thank you for your respone, I have another question I would like to ask. I need to find loopholes around it since my site has already been developed. Can I just put up a forum and insist members into sharing files (no where on the site will mention wares) and add a disclaimer. Will that save me?
The best thing to do is to stay away from that sort of sites. The only thing you’re going to accomplish is getting your hardware confiscated and a big fat law suit that will suck you dry. There are plenty of examples of people that had sites like you have and got bust, just do a Google search and you’ll find many examples.
Yea, you should really delete the site ASAP. If you were serious on keeping it, call a lawyer and talk to them. Good luck.
move to an offshore hosting provider. You should be ok. Also its best not to mention warez directly and also add a very good disclaimer. (add stickies at the top of the forum categories stating that your site does not promote or advise people to share and that they should support the respective industries by purchasing originals) There are ways around it. But be careful also as I take it you are into the warez scene, so you need to stop that right now and by this I mean your home PC needs to be clean as a whistle as you run a good chance of getting raided. (and they will do you for what you have at home if they can't get to the server). After all of that you need to then decide if you want to continue. z
Sweden seems to be able to get by with stuff like this (Like Pirate Bay, etc.). It seems like a pretty dangerous area to try to be in--especially if you plan to set foot in the US. Keep in mind what happened to the CEO of the offshore gambling sites. He got off a plane in the US and they arrested him--even though what he was doing wasn't illegal in the country he was working from. Another thing to consider is that if you are making any type of money from the site (ads, affiliate programs, etc.) you are likely to be a bigger target because you are making a profit of the copyrighted work of others. There have been a few lawsuits regarding bit torrent files where sites have been allowed to stay up because they are hosting the torrent not the actual infringing files, but unless you have the money to spend on a good lawyer this probably isn't safe to try. There is another idea on how to get around the copyright issue using something called Monolith (http://monolith.sourceforge.net/). The basic idea is that you take a copyrighted file and XOR it with a file that you are free to distribute (say an opensource file of some type). The resulting file is not the copyrighted file. You distribute the opensource file as well as the resulting file. Users can recreate the original file by taking the opensource file and the resulting file and running them through an algorithm. Technically the resulting file isn't the copyrighted file, so what you are distributing isn't covered under copyright. This hasn't been tested in court and I doubt you could get it to hold up without having a very very good team of lawyers. I'm not recommending you do this. It is just an interesting idea some people have come up with who are doing thought experiments about what copyright means in a digital age.