Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

Why wouldn't it be? You're not actually hosting a tracker in this case, only looking at incoming connections. And even if you do run a tracker, hard to make the case that the tracker itself is illega. Hosting something like opentrackr is like hosting a search engine, how they respond to legal takedown requests is where the crux is at, and whatever infra sits around the tracker, so police and courts can see/assume the intent. But trackers are pretty stupid coordination server software, would be crazy if they became illegal.

They'll just see tracker and assume it's illegal.

Even if you didn't mean your local police, and meant a national body like the FBI, the truth is they focus on other crimes (eg. child abuse), and even then they are woefully unable to handle even most of those crimes.

The vast, vast majority of copyright enforcement comes from copyright holders ... not the internet copyright police.

The police rarely find crimes on their own -- they are almost always acting on a request from someone else.

There are a few internet/copyright safe harbor provisions (in the US) that might maybe (probably not) make it not a crime, I don't know, I'm not a lawyer. But your general thought when you hear "helping someone else commit a crime" ought to be "that's probably a crime itself".

"I then started the tracker. After about an hour, it peaked at about 1.7 million distinct torrents across 3.1 million peers!"

Copyright infinging materials dont go "though" trackers. Trackers only keep torrent hashes and lists of peers.

Running a service primarily for legal purposes that some criminals can take advantage of is pretty different with regards to intent than reviving an old domain name that you know is primarily used by old illegal torrents as a tracker.

I spent a few minutes googling, and it seems like that at least as of a decade ago the exact bounds here weren't well defined: https://www.scotusblog.com/2014/03/opinion-analysis-justice-...

> Finally, the possible liability for an “incidental facilitator” – such as a firearms dealer who knows that some customers will use their purchases for crime – is noted but not resolved. Thus, thankfully, there is still some fertile ground for hypotheticals with which we practicing law professors can bedevil our students.

Right, that makes sense. Is running a tracker "knowingly helping people commit crimes"? I feel like that's a huge jump, there is a wide range of content coordinated by trackers and the DHT.

> So I was, uh, downloading some linux isos, like usual.

Nothing to see here, move along.

Seriously though, the OP makes the same argument and concludes that:

> I was spooked. [...] I shut down the VPS and deleted the domain quickly after confirming it works.

IANAL but this clearly shows the OP didn't intend to facilitate crime and shut it down after seeing that was what may have been happening.

> But the OP states he was using the tracker for lawful purposes:

That quote is a confession that he was committing copyright infringement. Courts and juries and not obliged to ignore the ", uh," part.

Probably (in the very unlikely event where he is charged) the best defence would be "this was a joke" not "I didn't literally confess to committing copyright infringement". Even then I'm pretty sure this quote would weigh against him substantially in just about any jury's mind.

IE he can see the peer pool but they don’t announce the peer list.

Maybe it's about time to revisit it? It's just the matter of how to enforce DRM. They shouldn't care in this day and age with plenty ways to get licensing sorted out.

It's kind of like Kim Dotcom's defence of his systems where he was saying that he was making attempts to remove content from his systems in compliance with DCMA requests. That is, the claim is his systems were legal because even though people were using them for illegitimate purposes, he was actively working to prevent that from happening.

I know, "linux ISOs" has always been a joke "rationale" :)

I do think we're in agreement.

If you don't respond to takedowns, that's probably leaning towards being illegal*

If you respond to takedowns and blacklist the hashes, you're most likely fine*

*obviously depends on the jurisdiction and on whether matching hashes to IP:PORT is considered distribution/facilitation/whatever (take TPB's case as an example)

I know someone who ran a pretty large tracker for years, when he received a takedown he just blacklisted the hashes and he's been fine so far.

Here it's not the "mere fact that somebody could use your tracker for piracy". It's that you're literally observing that a bunch of old mostly-piracy torrents are pointing at this domain, and then deciding to turn this domain back into a service which assists in that piracy.

He doesn't know if they're mostly piracy or not, all he sees is a hash and the peers.

Also the government and private companies have argued in the past that the hashes and lists of peers is inducement and enablement for copyright infringement.

The police/courts/jury is not obliged to put blinders on just because you would prefer if they did.

The mere fact that the domain name was previously used for this is almost certainly probable cause to get search warrants that will almost certainly provide the requisite proof beyond a reasonable doubt that he has in fact intentionally both committed himself, and aided others in committing (because he knew what the domain name was, or at least recognized it as similar to demonoid and could guess), copyright infringement. And that's without the blog post... (which I assume in the hypothetical where he chose to keep running this he would not have posted).

Oh boy, are the crypto bros in trouble.

Eg. Canonical distributes Ubuntu via BitTorrent too: https://ubuntu.com/download/alternative-downloads

Edit: I missed the "uh," in the OP: I stand corrected.

Why do you say that?

I think even seemingly "useless" questions can lead to valuable discussions and insights... and it might also be possible that your perspective is not the only valid one.

What's useful (or not) to one person is not always the same for others.

But yeah, I don’t think Canonical would use open.demonii.si as a tracker for their torrents.

So yes, data "goes through it". Do you think law enforcement understands the nuance of metadata vs actual data?

However the important bit isn’t winning in a harassment case but having documentation to get them to stop in the future.

You made a hypothetical assuming they would do something they wouldn’t because it puts them at risk.

In my country we have a phrase for this exact scenario: "the punishment is the process".

When the government or a powerful person wants to fuck with you, all they have to do is drag you endlessly through the court system, even knowing they'll loose. Because the experience will be 100x more painful for you to win than it is for them to loose.

It's what the UK government did to the postal workers in the Fujitsu scandal.

I also don't know of any precedent where bittorrent software/client itself was ruled illegal (but am not a lawyer).

My family members sued each other over a small inheritance. 5 kids fighting over a couple million dollars. Case has dragged out across almost 4 decades. Lawyer fees dwarfed the size of what was being fought over several times over. Some family spent time in jail for contempt of court... Family members then put up all their personal assets to keep fighting. Then they lost and were faced with a judgment that left them destitute well into their retirement years with no way to earn new money. Some family members are still appealing and fighting adjacent court battles (property seizure, etc). This process has consumed the last decades of their lives and everything they worked their whole lives for.

Not only would I say never end up in court, I'll extend you one further. Never get the government involved in your personal relationships.

Good question though, would love to know what specific tech is in use (or if it's just "finding it on search engines organically")

For one, a judge/jury does not infer things they are "supposed to know", such as whether torrents are mostly used for piracy or not... they only operate based on the evidence presented.

There is a very large burden of proof in criminal cases, requiring that their intent to facilitate a crime be proven "beyond a reasonable doubt".

Trying to say "everyone knows linux ISOs is code for piracy" or claim that "a judge would see right through that" is simply not how things work... decisions cannot be made based on any type of prior knowledge like that.

The entire point of a criminal court case (as a prosecutor) is to convince a judge/jury that the defendant is guilty using evidence and testimony, which means they must prove that there was clear intent to commit/facilitate a crime, i.e. they knew it was illegal and did it anyway.

Simply running a torrent tracker in and of itself doesn't prove any of that.

"Beyond a reasonable doubt" doesn't mean you can just say "no that's not true" about anything and have it not count. It's beyond a reasonable doubt, not beyond any doubt. It's not reasonable that this tracker address was gotten from a Linux ISO. Perhaps the defendant could claim they got it from a list of trackers, but they already admitted they didn't, so that's not reasonable either.

Even if that were proven as true, so what? There's nothing illegal about using the domain itself.

> It's not reasonable that this tracker address was gotten from a Linux ISO

Sorry but you don't get to be the judge of that, the judge does.

>Never get the government involved in your personal relationships.

Amen! You can't tax friendship.