U.S. Government Seizes BitTorrent Search Engine Domain and More

[Cedric Laurant]

Jorge,

The only difference I'd see between a website like torrent-finder.com
and one of the major search engines (Bing, Google,...) is the fact
that torrent-finder uses frames to show the links to torrent websites
and even to the illegal torrent files themselves.  It also displays,
on top of the search field, a list of torrent websites that
presumably must have paid torrent-finder to be listed there.

Torrent-finder could then be considered to derive some benefit from
linking to those torrent websites and torrent files, made more
obvious by its use of framing that graphically makes its user think
he still is on torrent-finder's website.  A search engine like
Google, however, generally links to results without any framing,
although it does derive benefits from its use of AdSense ads on its
right margin.

The difference between making a link by "framing" and one by a deep
link was made clear in a 1998 case: Washington Post v. TotalNews  (97
Civ. 1190 (S.D.N.Y., filed Feb. 2, 1997).
http://jolt.law.harvard.edu/articles/pdf/v11/11HarvJLTech401.pdf

Cedric
---
>Thanks Brenden,

[...]

>Still can't find the rationale related to torrent-finder.com, perhaps
>the site had an ad banner pointing to one of the bad guys ?
>
>Cheers
>Jorge
>
>On Mon, Nov 29, 2010 at 10:27 AM, Brenden Kuerbis
><bkuerbis at internetgovernance.org> wrote:
>>  @IGPAlert DoJ's remarks on recent domain name
>>
>>seizures http://www.justice.gov/iso/opa/ag/speeches/2010/ag-speech-101129.html
>>  Purchases were made from websites to confirm sale of counterfeit goods.
>>  Nothing mentioned about the search engine website.
>>  Hopefully, remarks from DHS-ICE's Morton will be published soon.


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