Re:RIAA to .ORG Registry: Take down ThePirateBay
by notahacker on Monday June 06, 2016 @04:59PM
(#11850323)
As you point out, classifieds and listings services already exist; the distinguishing feature of MurderBay is that everything from the website name to the owners' public declarations of contempt for takedown requests is designed to encourage people to use the site to seek out assassins/murders and as a result the vast majority of people using the site are there to search for links to facilitate the commitment of murders. Sound familiar? (OK, much worse, fair enough) The same could not be said for Craigslist, which is why Craig Newmark has spent an awful lot less time in courtrooms and prison cells than the people behind a certain Swedish website despite his website probably having facilitated the commitment of crimes that hurt people a lot more than filesharing ever conceivably could.
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Re:RIAA to .ORG Registry: Take down ThePirateBay
by Dylan16807 on Monday June 06, 2016 @07:32PM
(#11851352)
Contempt is not a basis for taking down a website. If the only 'encouragement' for certain groups to use a site is the political opinions of the owner, then that is not a legal problem.
Re:RIAA to .ORG Registry: Take down ThePirateBay
by notahacker on Monday June 06, 2016 @07:58PM
(#11851463)
In the legal opinion of more than a few courts it is. You don't have to be at all sympathetic to the RIAA to imagine why it might be a struggle for a legal team to persuasively argue that a site called the Pirate Bay which used to[1] boast that it had never taken a link to a torrent off the site and never would actually was encouraging the piracy that most of its visitors used it for.
[1]probably still does; I can't access it through regular web browsing due to a legal ruling...
Re:RIAA to .ORG Registry: Take down ThePirateBay
by rhizome on Wednesday June 08, 2016 @10:14PM
(#11867149)
If boasting had a legal basis for the courts to respect, a lot of rappers would be in trouble over the past decades.
I get it: you think sentiment should be conclusive, and in many cases you could say that it is in practice, but it's hard if not impossible to make a case against a disfavorable entity solely on that basis.
And the RIAA has certainly disparaged defendants in many if not all cases. Hard to say how much effect it really has, though.