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Comment on Music Industry Threatens to Sue UK Pirate Party over Pirate Bay Proxyparent

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Tthey are effectively saying distributing a 160 bit number is effectively illegal. Magnets are just SHA1 hashes of a torrent file.

Then again, you could argue any media or program stored is just a really long many-bit number, so I guess we have been making numbers illegal for decades.

The magnet link is basically a hash of a bunch of hashes of copyrighted content.

If distributing that is wrong, is it okay to distribute a hash of many hashes that are all each hashes of hashes of copyrighted content? (The magnet link to a list of magnet links) Suppose I merely mention the name that you can google to find the hash of many hashes of hashes of copyrighted content? I wonder how many layers do we have to add before everyone admits that the situation is absurd?

It's not clear that the proxy is being sued for copyright infringement. It might be for "aiding and abetting". After all, driving a car is not illegal, but driving a getaway car for a bank robber is. Or it might even be a civil case in which they claim damages.

So reword 'number' as 'ID'. Sure, you can't get around content being content by reframing it as a number. But this number is not content. It is solely an identifier. They are trying to make it illegal to mention the ID code of files.

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