RawAlex

Gideon, again you are trying to take something extremely narrow (one video that may not have had a copyright notice on it) and you are trying to broadbrush that onto everything else in the universe.

The world doesn't work that way.

The lack of a copyright notice on the prints doesn't negate copyright. In fact, since 1976, the mere act of production infers copyright immediately on to the producer or creator, without even requring publication. By definition, everything produced since 1976 is copyrighted. You might want to read (and try to understand as a whole http://www.copyright.gov/circs/circ40.html#copyright )

The bar isn't set any lower on the internet at all. If I intentionally marketed my porn site in highschools or at junior little league, with a tag line like "Steal your fathers credit card so you can see hot naked girls", I would be in the same bad situation as a shop owner selling porn to minors (worse because I marketed it that way).

Now, if my shop was filled with CP, stolen content, and there were two crack dealers working in one corner, the question wouldn't be selling to minors, but about the whole operation. TBP isn't a video store, they are a couple of guys with a DVD duplicator banging off copies of movies for $1 at a county fair. Again, you are trying to broadbrush something into the discussion that isn't relevant. It takes less than 30 seconds to show that the majority of the content (read pretty all) on TPB's front page is illegally sourced. It isn't like "oops, one got past us", it is all stolen, they know it, they profit from it, and they do nothing about it.

Except you are conveniently forgetting the nature of torrents (you who has lectured us all on not understanding how thy work). I put up a torrent on a tracker and I seed it. Putting it on the tracker is intermediate, but the actual act of seeding is direct. Like it or not, for the first go around, the file is in one place and it comes from one place. Even if I take that file and upload it to a group shared server or other, I am the intial source for the distribution to thousands, which makes me the direct violator.

As for TPB, they aren't "contributory", but they are a very direct part of the game. Without their site and without their trackers (under their name and other names that they own) there would be essentially no way to trade the files. No matter how distributed P2P networks become, someone, somewhere has to maintain an up to date list of where to find the pieces. Without that list, people would have to manually enter IP addresses of peers to get files.

You don't have to host the files to be a integral and direct part of the distribution. It is very direct. I make a copy. I tell TPB about it. They give you all the information on where to get it. They are 100% integral to the process of stealing the file.

Don't believe me? Turn on your torrent program without a single tracker or file in your list. Add a file. What is the first thing it does? It doesn't call your neighbor and say "hey, want this file"... it contacts a tracker and the file gets added to trackers so that people can find it. The trackers are your partners, equal level to you in the process of DIRECTLY distribtuing stolen content. Without them, you wouldn't be able to do it. Why do you think trackers are the greatest vunerability of the whole torrent system, and one of the things that TPB and others are so concerned about? Why do you think that 99% of tracker domains are registered either will bogus whois information or hosting in china or sweden? Everywhere else in the world, they would be considered direct copyright infringers. You don't have to control the storage medium (distributed storage by P2P) to be the direct distributor of the content.

The courts never buy "and then a miracle happens and two computers just magically connect with no outside intervention". It would be laughable.

So, explain to me carefully how, without TPB (and it's buddies) and without trackers that torrents would get traded. I would be interested to know.