The IA has tried distributing their stores, but nowhere near enough people actually put their storage where their mouths are.
Typically because most people who have the upload, don't know that they can. And if they come to the notion on their own, they won't know how.
If they put the notion to a search engine, the keywords they come up with probably don't return the needed ELI5 page.
As in: How do I [?] for the Internet Archive?, most folks won't know what [?] needs to be.
What are some legal torrent trackers?
Most casual visitors to IA don't know that. Which is the point.
Giving up is for others.
Criminals using tools does not make the tools criminal.
To me that's not even related to it being a torrent tracker, just that they were "aiding and abetting" copyright infringement.
This has precedent in illegal drug categorization, it's not just about the damage, but its ratio of noxious to helpful use.
In Law the technicalities matter.
Trackers generally do not host any content, just hashcodes and (sometimes) meta data descriptions of content.
If "your" (ie let's say _you_ TZubiri) client is distributing child pornography content because you have a partially downloaded CP file then that's on _you_ and not on the tracker.
The "tracker" has unique hashcode signatures of tens of millions of torrents - it literaly just puts clients (such as the one that you might be running yourself on your machine in the example above) in touch with other clients who are "just asking" about the same unique hashcode signature.
Some tracker affiliated websites (eg: TPB) might host searchable indexes of metadata associated with specific torrents (and still not host the torrents themselves) but "pure" trackers can literally operate with zero knowledge of any content - just arrange handshakes between clients looking for matching hashes - whether that's UbuntuLatest or DonkeyNotKong
On the other hand I also believe that a tracker that hosts hashes of illegal content, provides search facilities for and facilitates their download, is responsible, in a big way. That's my personal opinion and I think it's backed in cases like the pirate bay and sci hub.
That 0 knowledge tracker is interesting, my first reaction is that it's going to end up in very nasty places like Tor, onion, etc..
Downloading from example.com is just peer to peer with someone big. There's lots of hosting providers and DNS providers that are happy to host illegal-in-some-places content.
Most actual trackers are zero knowledge.
A tracker (bit of central software that handles 100+ thousand connections/second) is not a "torrent site" such as TPB, EZTV, etc.
A tracker handshakes torrent clients and introduces peers to each other, it has no idea nor needs an idea that "SomeName 1080p DSPN" maps to D23F5C5AAE3D5C361476108C97557F200327718A
All it needs is to store IP addresses that are interested in that hash and to pass handfuls of interested IP addresses to other interested parties (and some other bookkeeping).
From an actual tracker PoV the content is irrelevant and there's no means of telling one thing from another other than size - it's how trackers have operated for 20+ years now.
Here are some actual tracker addresses and ports
udp://tracker.opentrackr.org:1337/announce
udp://p4p.arenabg.com:1337/announce
udp://tracker.torrent.eu.org:451/announce
udp://tracker.dler.org:6969/announce
udp://open.stealth.si:80/announce
udp://ipv4.tracker.harry.lu:80/announce
https://opentracker.i2p.rocks:443/announce
Trackers can hand out .torrent files if asked (bencoded dictionaries that describe filenames, sizes, checksums, directory structures of a torrents contents) but they don't have to; mostly they hand out peer lists of other clients .. peers can also answer requests for .torrent files.
A .torrent file isn't enough to determine illegal content.
Pornography can be contained in files labelled "BeautifulSunset.mkv" and Rick Astley parody videos can frequently be found in files labelled "DirtyFilthyRepubicanFootTappingNudeAfrica.avi"
Given that it's not clear how trackers could effectively filter by content that never actually traverses their servers.
Mathematically a tracker would offer a function that given a hash, it returns you a list of peers with that file.
While a "torrent site" like TPB or SH, would offer a search mechanism, whereby they would host an index, content hashes and english descriptors, along with a search engine.
A user would then need to first use the "torrent site" to enter their search terms, and find the hash, then they would need to give the hash to a tracker, which would return the list of peers?
Is that right?
In any case, each party in the transaction shares liability. If we were analyzing a drug case or a people trafficking case, each distributor, wholesaler or retailer would bear liability and face criminal charges. A legal defense of the type "I just connected buyers with sellers I never exchanged the drug" would not have much chance of succeding, although it is a common method to obstruct justice by complicating evidence gathering. (One member collects the money, the other gives the drugs.)
> Is that right?
More or less.
> In any case, each party in the transaction shares liability.
That's exactly right Bob. Just as a telephone exchange shares liability for connecting drug sellers to drug buyers when given a phone number.
Clearly the telephone exchange should know by the number that the parties intend to discuss sharing child pornography rather than public access to free to air documentaries.
How do you propose that a telephone exchange vet phone numbers to ensure drugs are not discussed?
Bear in mind that in the case of a tracker the 'call' is NOT routed through the exchange.
With a proper telephone exchange the call data (voices) pass through the exchange equipment, with a tracker no actual file content passes through the trackers hardware.
The tracker, given a number, tells interested parties about each other .. they then talk directly to each other; be it about The Sky at Night -s2024e07- 2024-10-07 Question Time or about Debbie Does Donkeys.
Also keep in mind that trackers juggle a vast volume of connections of which a very small amount would be (say) child abuse related.
If this is what people think we need to work on education...
I'll restate the principle of good usage to bad usage ratio, telephone providers are a well established service with millions of legitimate users and uses. Furthermore they are a recognized service in law, they are regulated, and they can comply with law enforcement.
They are closer to the ISP, which according to my theory has some liability as well.
It's just a matter of the liability being small and the service to society being useful and necessary.
To take a spin to a similar but newer tech, consider crypto. My position is that its legality and liability for illegal usage of users (considering that of exchanges and online wallets, since the network is often not a legal entity) will depend on the ratio of legitimate to ilegitimate use that will be given to it.
There's definitely a second system effect, were undesirables go to the second system, so it might be a semantical difference unrelated to the technical protocols. Maybe if one system came first, or if by chance it were the most popular, the tables would be turned.
But I feel more strongly that there's design features that make law compliance, traceability and accountability difficult. In the case of trackers perhaps the microservice/object is a simple key-value store, but it is semantically associated with other protocols which have 'noxious' features described above AND are semantically associates with illegal material.
The average person, in my experience, can barely work a non-cellphone filesystem and actively stresses when a terminal is in front of them, especially for a brief moment. Education went out the window a decade ago.
Well, OK, maybe other webpage archives don't work as well, I haven't tried them, but there are others. And they're newer, so don't have such extensive historical pages.
Large numbers of Wikipedia references (which relied on IA to prevent link rot) must be completely broken now.
Ditto trackers.
Have a look at the graphs here: https://opentrackr.org/
Over 10 million torrents tracked daily, on the order of 300 thousand connections per second, handshaking between some 200 million peers per week.
That's material from the Internet Archive, software releases, pooled filesharing, legitimate content sharing via embedded clients that use torrents to share load, and a lot of TV and movies that have variable copyright status
( One of the largest TV|Movie sharing sites for decades recent closed down after the sole operator stopped bearing the cost and didn't want to take on dubious revenue sources; that was housed in a country that had no copyright agreements with the US or UK and was entirely legal on its home soil.
Another "club" MVGroup only rip documentaries that are "free to air" in the US, the UK, Japan, Australia, etc. and in 20 years of publicaly sharing publicaly funded content haven't had any real issues )
> the ISP, which according to my theory has some liability as well.
The world's a big place.
The US MPA (Motion Picture Association - the big five) backed an Australian mini-me group AFACT (Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft) to establish ISP liability in a G20 country as a beach head bit of legislation.
That did not go well: Roadshow Films Pty Ltd v iiNet Ltd decided in the High Court of Australia (2012) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roadshow_Films_Pty_Ltd_v_iiNet...
The alliance of 34 companies unsuccessfully claimed that iiNet authorised primary copyright infringement by failing to take reasonable steps to prevent its customers from downloading and sharing infringing copies of films and television programs using BitTorrent.
The trial court delivered judgment on 4 February 2010, dismissing the application and awarding costs to iiNet.
An appeal to the Full Court of the Federal Court was dismissed.
A subsequent appeal to the High Court was unanimously dismissed on 20 April 2012.
This case is important in copyright law of Australia because it tests copyright law changes required in the Australia–United States Free Trade Agreement, and set a precedent for future law suits about the responsibility of Australian Internet service providers with regards to copyright infringement via their services.
> but it is semantically associated with other protocols which have 'noxious' features described above AND are semantically associates with illegal material.
Gosh, semantics hey. Some people feel in their waters that this is a protocol used by criminals and must therefore by banned or policed into non existance?
Is that a legal argument?
I also indicated above that having knowledge of .torrent manifests is problematic as that doesn't provide real actual knowledge of file contents just knowledge of file names ... LatestActionMovie.mkv might be a rootkit virus and HappyBunnyRabbits.avi might be the worst most exploitative underage pornography you can think of.
Some trackers are also private and require membership keys to access.
I was skating a lot as TZubiri seems unaware of many of the actual details and legitimate use cases, existing law, etc.