"I'm just linking to another host!" - Warez and Adult Issues. Legal or No?

So, earlier today, I was talking with a rather old teen who wanted to create a forum. Being experienced in this area, I decided to help him out on setting the forum up, giving him some other forums and sites that'll help him (Yup, included DP ) get rolling.

Well, everything was nice and sound until I asked, "You want to make your forums somewhat topic specific if you really want some members. General forums covering everything don't do too well. What are you looking to run?" Surprisingly, his answer was, "Some warez forum."

So, I told him that as he probably knows, hosting warez and illegal files on his servers is illegal and that he'll probably get shut down by the host before he could even hit the 10 member mark. "Then how about... adult forums?" If my understanding is correct, adult content is also "illegal" if they are content from real adult sites using memberships.

According to this fellow that I now wasn't too motivated to help and be all that generous, he said that some forums will hotlink to other websites that have these contents hosted. So that his forums will only help members in finding these links and not hosting them themselves.

If my understanding is correct, this is still illegal as if my knowledge suits me right, by assisting one in doing such illegal acts is also "illegal". I tried to convince him this way, but he seems to think otherwise.

So I'm asking some experts here on DP. If you're only assisting members (through forums) by linking to BitTorrents (not legal, but illegal torrents), RapidShare links, etc. is the forum owner actually conducting an illegal act or not?

To me, it seems just as bad as the one that's hosting and the one that's uploading.

Enlighten me please.

Thanks!

 

It is indeed illegal. In US law it's called contributary infringement and sites have been found guilty for doing it.

 

I posted my previous message from my mobile so I wasn't able to give you a link to what I was talking about (can't edit my previous post), so here it is.

Linking to copyrighted material illegal. This is a discussion on the subject and has links to other sites and their opinions.

 

Yes, it is illegal even though you are linking to another server.

 

It pretty much depends on where you live. Though in US it's definitely illegal, there's not really a big chance that mister sheriff with his badge is gonna knock on your door.