Resurrecting a dead torrent tracker and finding 3M peers

Because knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself. I.e. federally in the U.S. under 18 USC 2a https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2 The software you're running being "simple" isn't a defence for doing illegal things with it - like aiding others commit crimes.

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".

Wouldn't particular knowledge be required? I'm sure Google devs know in the abstract that Google search is used by criminals to help them in committing crimes, but that clearly is not illegal in and of itself.

Well Google has knowledge about it, but once you reach a certain scale you become safe (e.g. OpenAI with copyright infringment)

There's definitely a mens rea requirement here, that you know that a crime is being committed and that you intend to facilitate it. I doubt it requires particularized knowledge that "this specific request" is for a crime... I'm still not a lawyer.

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.

> knowingly helping people commit crimes generally

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.

It's not like he just started a random new torrent tracker... he took over an old domain that was previously in use by people pirating stuff after observing that torrents were still pointing to the tracker and ran a tracker on that domain. That's a pretty direct line to "he knew this would be used for copyright infringement".

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

> 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.

I, and I think OP, were both addressing the hypothetical in which he continued to run the service, not the reality where he quickly shut it down.

> 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.

IANAL, but I would think that Google's customers are overwhelmingly using the service for "legitimate" activities, and Google makes attempts to limit use of their tools in the commission of a crime.

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.

> That quote is a confession that he was committing copyright infringement.

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

I do think we're in agreement.

IANAL, but I would think you’d also have to have specific mens rea. That is, it’s not illegal to use a torrent or facilitate a torrent, because it’s just a protocol that can be used for good or bad. If you were hosting movies and songs, whatever the protocol, that’s when you’re specifically engaging in piracy. It’s sort of like driving a car isn’t illegal, but being the getaway driver for a bank robbery is, even if you never enter the bank. The car isn’t the problem, it’s what you are using it for. It’s also not illegal to sell a car to a bank robber, even if that’s a possibility, unless you reasonably believe that the particular person you were selling it to is a bank robber and will be using it to commit a crime. The mere fact that somebody could use your tracker for piracy doesn’t loop you into the conspiracy unless you specifically know that they are committing piracy. This is why the telecom companies all have carve outs for this sort of thing. Carrying packets or voice traffic of someone planning a crime doesn’t loop the telecom company into the conspiracy.

I'm not saying it's illegal to "run a torrent tracker". When Blizzard use to (pre 2015) update Starcraft via torrent I assume they ran their own tracker for that, and that was totally legal. Even if there was some way for a pirate to take advantage of the Blizzard tracker.

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.

> 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.

Exactly.

He did not choose the domain name by chance. He chose it because he observed it was previously in use as a tracker for copyright infringing torrents.

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).

> Because knowingly helping people commit crimes generally counts the same as committing the crime yourself.

Oh boy, are the crypto bros in trouble.

They explicitly used it to download "Linux isos", which are highly likely not copyright infringing (they are usually free to distribute).

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

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

What kind of threshold do courts tend to put on that, for the percentage of illegal activity? Because pretty much any service that connects lots of people together is guaranteed to have some.

Why did people just accept this is a crime at all? You don't appear to be a zoomer.

They explicitly used it to “download ‘Linux isos’”, indeed!

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

It's based on how much money you have. Google can hire expensive lawyers, so it's fine.

They wrote "download Linux ISO"s" yet they're using an old piracy tracker domain, which Linux ISOs don't use. The court is not stupid.

And Facebook/Meta, for the same.

I've read most of these comments and I think it's clear most people have no idea how criminal court cases work.

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.

For the purposes of a criminal case, yes, they are intentionally stupid... it's up to the prosecution to prove "beyond a reasonable doubt" that something they did was illegal and that they knew it and chose to do it anyway. What a judge/jury thinks about this person, or "linux ISOs", is irrelevant... their job is only to interpret the information given to them.

There is no reasonable doubt that the domain used is for piracy and the defendant knew as much.

"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.

> There is no reasonable doubt that the domain used is for piracy and the defendant knew as much.

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.