Monday, June 11, 2012

What is a magnet link?

A bit of a follow up on yesterday's dissertation on the nature of hyperlinks.

First, I wanted to point out that torrent sites do not actually host any copyrighted (or otherwise) data whatsoever, but merely link to where the data can be had.  Censoring these is much like censoring bomb-making data--except even more asinine, as no one ever got blown up by a pirated movie.

A magnet link is basically a new type of torrent file that abstracts this one level further--the torrent site hosts only links to where the torrent files are located, more or less, thus creating an extra level of abstraction.  They are directions to directions, would be one way to think of them.

So the question is, do we censor the directions to the directions?  At what point does this game become obviously absurd to everyone?

I've given out directions on how to pirate stuff on this blog several times already--and I'll be doing it lots more, too.  Should this blog be censored?  Should Google eliminate it from its search results?

What if someone else were to merely talk about this blog?

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