Quote:
Originally Posted by DMSmillie
However MobileRead is located on servers in Canada, so what matters, surely, from a legal perspective, is whether or not the material is in the public domain according to Canadian law?
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The material is located in Canada, where it's legal, but the MR forums are giving out links to material that's not legal to download for many of its members.
Torrent sites often don't host any material at all; they just share links. Why is it okay to shut down a torrent-linking site, which shows where files are available to download even if that's illegal in your location, but not okay to shut down MR, which shows where files are available to download even if that's illegal in your location?
The legal logic is the same in both cases. MR can perhaps claim that the majority of its activity is not filesharing, but by that logic, any torrent-linking site that has an active messageboard could avoid prosecution. (And many of them do.)
There hasn't yet been a precedent established that "it's legal to point people to files it'd be illegal for them to download, as long as those files are legal where they're hosted." If that were the case, one could get around all the issues by buying server space in Afghanistan.