Technology
Facebook no longer allows users to link to The Pirate Bay
Facebook no longer allows its billions of users to post links to the world’s most well-known website used for piracy, The Pirate Bay.
If you attempt to link out to the site in a post, Facebook intercedes and issues the following message:
Until recently, links to The Pirate Bay were still allowed on the world’s largest social media service.
File-sharing publication Torrent Freak noticed the change in the last few weeks in the wake of a spate of blocks of other popular websites used for piracy.
The Pirate Bay is notorious for hosting a massive, user-maintained index of torrents to pirated material: Films, TV shows, music, and software, among other things. Rather than directly hosting the pirated files, Pirate Bay hosts torrents — a kind of data file that enables people with torrenting software to them download files directly from other users.
Torrenting itself isn’t inherently illegal: It’s a way of distributing file downloads across a variety of users that enables rapid file downloading without any one user footing the bandwidth bill.
Read more: Facebook is overflowing with groups offering pirated films — and says it won’t do anything about it
In that way, The Pirate Bay skirts the illegality of pirated intellectual property — users aren’t downloading pirated material directly from The Pirate Bay, they’re just downloading torrent files. Those torrent files enable users to download pirated material.
In the prompt on Facebook that stops users from sharing links to The Pirate Bay, it says links to the site “goes against our community standards.” Though it’s not explicitly clear, the standard this appears to violate falls under the “Respecting Intellectual Property” section, which states, “We are committed to helping people and organizations promote and protect their intellectual property rights. Facebook’s Terms of Service do not allow people to post content that violates someone else’s intellectual property rights, including copyright and trademark.”
Representatives for Facebook and The Pirate Bay didn’t respond to a request as of publishing.
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