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Sure he made a lot of money doing it but he just posted links. How is this different from Google (or any other search engine)?


it is different in those ways:

* google has established business with presence in most countries where it does pay a huge tax. therefore this fact that they feed a government/police system alone makes them less vulnerable for through investigations

* google has tens of thousands employees and it would be very difficult to prosecute an individual. Given 150 engineers worked on google search engine to display links, would you want to see all of them behind bars? that would be bigger trial than Nurnberg's.

I dont agree with any of what I wrote. But unfortunately thats just the way it is -- to big to prosecute :( Basically there is no difference between Google and any other web to search and find links. Try to type any movie name using dot instead of space and add "torrent" [1]

[1] https://www.google.com/#hl=en&q=vanilla.sky+torrent&...


Are you actually asking or is it rhetorical?

Search engines contain automatic references to, roughly speaking, the entire internet (minus explicitly blocked content). The search engine is used to obtain a vast amount of knowledge by a vast number of people. It will link copyright infringing material at a low percentage rate.

TVShack on the other hand is used exclusively to link to copyright infringing material. It's used for a very singular purpose at a near one hundred percent rate.

IANAL in any country so I can't say what, if any, legal difference exists. Practically speaking the difference is rather straight forward. One entity (TVShack) exists for the exclusive purpose of linking copyrighted material and one does not.


The difference between the two is obvious but at a very basic level all TVShack did was provide links. I can't see why linking to content should ever be illegal. And I think this is another case where they are just trying to make an example of someone. If they actually cared about copyright infringement they would go after the companies hosting the content he linked to.


So if he added a couple of links to free movies would that have saved him? I dont see your argument here.




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