Could someone explain the legalities behind running a website like isohunt, a search engine for torrents, on a server located in the US? Much Thanks
Basically...is it legal? lol And I am not meaning a torrent server or tracker or whatever. JUST a torrent search engine.
its as legal as google to find malware or mp3 files... you warn people about the legal issues on downloading copyrighted material... by the way , the scripteen torrent search engine is my own script... i have coded it myself... and he doesnt have resell rights... that s why it looks similar with my own script ... is it helpful enough?
well, we`ve had this discussions like, million times now...but what the heck, i`ll answer it again.. as long as u don`t intend to host anything illegal on your server its fine...& the "torrent search engine" as such, is legal!!
Thanks for both your help. runbrun: I deleted my reply on your topic because I realized it probably was. Not to mention it looks like a lot more work was put into torrentify than scripteen.
actually , it is strongly recommended you do not host the .torrent files. this is where you face lawsuits.
isoHunt is currently in a federal copyright lawsuit. TorrentSpy was shut down by the courts. The idea that a site is perfectly legal as long as it does not host material is wishful thinking at best. Here is the truth of the matter. It has not been determined in the US whether this is true or not. Generally, when a case is decided a precedent is set. One of the only cases that has been decided by the courts to date on this specific issue ended in the site getting shut down. Normally, this would set a precedent. In the case of TorrentSpy, however, they destroyed evidence. So, the decision was as much about that as anything else. There is still the isoHunt case to be determined, which will give a much clearer picture. There are several cases that one could look at and come up with a legal theory. For example, the Google v Perfect Ten case. Two things to be aware of here. One, there were no ads involved so it was not seen as a commercial venture (which can change the whole game). Two, in this casse the image search was not treated as a general search engine. The reason is that now you are looking for a specific type of content. In this case, torrents. A reasonable person would be aware that the vast majority of torrent files are attached to files that violate copyright. This is where the Grokster (P2P) case comes in. Grokster did not host any files and yet they lost their lawsuit because their service was being used mainly to get material that violated copyright. On the other hand, there have been some recent cases that could indicate a different outcome. One such case involved links to copyrighted material for download. The judge decided that a hyperlionk that contained no violating material did not constitute copyright infringement. A similar case decided at about the same time went completely the other way. The reality is that this type of site still poses lots of legal issues for the owner (unless they live in Sweden). Can you be sued? Obviously, yes. Would you win? It would depend on the judge you land in front of and what level of understanding of the internet the judge has. Will you get sued? At this time, it seems mostly just the big guns are getting sued, but if you aren't hoping to get high traffic, what's the point?
99% of websites are legal as long as you have a clear, descriptive disclaimer to your clients / users. For example, on a torrent site: etc.. This would clear you of all legal issues surrounding illegal torrents etc which may end up on your TSE.
Disclaimers are at best a band-aid. Most "legal" disclaimers give no protection at all. A legal disclaimer only works if a) the things being disclaimed can legally be so - for example you can not disclaim liability for selling faulty equipment that poses a danger when being used as directed b) the situation that is at issue in a court case matches the wording of the disclaimer c) you actually abide by the disclaimer in the first place. For example, the disclaimer snippet above says that pirated torrent content is strictly prohibited. If the site where that disclaimer is located does not actually do anything about material they know to be infringing, then the disclaimer is essentially worthless. Also, given the example above, if the question is whether the site is guilty of contributory infringement by providing links to pirated material that is not hosted on that site, the plaintiff's attorney can easily say that the disclaimer does not apply because the file was not uploaded to or downloaded from the site. Rather, the file itself was downloaded from the other users of the site, nullifying the disclaimer. Most importantly, if such search engines are found to be illegal (and they haven't really been found one way or the other) no disclaimer can make an illegal activity legal. Look at what happened with most of the big tab sites. Grokster had a similar approach to their disclaimer. Since the underlying activity was found to be illegal, the disclaimer was worthless in court.