- either you have no money at all, and you'll probably get a pass
- or you have some money, and you'll get sued until all that money goes into the rights-holders' pockets or your lawyers' pockets, whichever comes first
- or you have a fricking huge amount of money, so much that you can withstand any amount of trial thrown at you and probably come out victorious in the long run
It's an attrition fight, and Google is the clear dominant fighter in the arena
I think youtube-dl even supports some of them, which would avoid the malware issue. Mining its supported sites list might be fruitful.
The site doesn't link to copyrighted content. It doesn't link to anything, in fact.
And the extension doesn't contain any references to copyrighted content. It contains no content, and is completely unaware of any sources of content. (No explicit whitelist patterns for sites it should run on, etc.)
And—at least as far as anyone can tell—the two things have different authors.
But put them together, and oops! You've got a piracy program! User's fault for putting them together, of course.
What you're describing is not that different Google in some ways. ISOHunt tried to make the Google argument about just being a search engine... but the distinction is that your visitors come specifically for torrents (mostly of a copyright nature) and your index provides copyright content. Google on the other hand is a general purpose search engine where copyright infringement make up a small percentage of their search. Your site would have to be a general search engine site to have any compelling legal argument.
You could alternatively try to argue that it’s not a “website,” but an app. Google calls certain websites “progressive apps,” for example, so it’s very plausible. That would be interesting.
Then again: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14001903