Query about the legality of Linking to Torrent Tracker

[Starcraftmazter]

Hello.

A user of mine wants to know if it's okey, if he links to a torrent tracker he runs on his computer. The link will be on his website, about his projects, which will be downloadable via the torrent software (snakebite) he has installed on his machine.

Is this legal? (Y/N).

Thanks!

 

[James]

I think it all depends on where you are.

But I think if you are aiming for high standards and professionalism, you might want to avoid anything torrent related which frankly is mostly used to aid warez.

 

[Richard]

Hosting account is in the US/EU/AU then it's illegal.

 

[[JSH]John]

If it's for warez then it'll be illegal, a lot of torrent sites have been closed down lately and sued for quite a bit.

If it's legal content then I'm sure there won't be a problem.

 

[krakjoe]

BitTorrent ( protocol ) isn't illegal
Running a tracker isn't illegal

It becomes illegal when the torrents being tracked are warez or copyrighted material ( copyrighted material that belongs to someone other than the person who published the .torrent file, or the server hosting the file ).

Lots of companies use the bittorrent protocol to distribute media, lots of linux distributions rely on it to save them thousands in bandwidth bills. That being said, there are very few trackers that facilitate entirely legal transfers.

Like James said, it always looks dodgy, and tbh for a personal account, there's no reason he can't use a third ( or first ) party file hosting service to distribute whatever files he has.

I wouldn't ...

 

[Starcraftmazter]

Thanks everyone