At the end of March The Pirate Bay added new functionality to reach out to millions of Facebook users. Just over a week later and the world’s largest social networking site has blocked all links to torrents on the world’s largest and most infamous BitTorrent tracker.
The entertainment industries were not happy with the new feature, but since The Pirate Bay is not exclusively used to spread copyrighted material, there wasn’t much they could do about it. Facebook users responded positively and many began posting torrent links in their profile. This integration of the world’s largest tracker and the world’s largest social networking site generated hundreds of news articles and excitement. But it wasn’t to last.
This morning Facebook decided to put an end to the sharing and blocked not only the feature, but all links to Pirate Bay’s torrents. The ‘Share on Facebook’ button on the TPB torrent download pages doesn’t work anymore, and neither does the Facebook bookmarklet. Manually adding a link to your Facebook messages isn’t allowed either, regardless of the “legality” of the content it’s linking to. Facebook has basically launched a site-wide ban of Pirate Bay torrent URLs.
Any message containing a torrent URL, like this one, is blocked. According to the message you’ll see on Facebook it is because it “has been reported as abusive by Facebook users” but this is inaccurate. Facebook is actively blocking the links, also for new torrents and ‘legal’ torrents that are uploaded by artist who want to share their work.
Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt told TorrentFreak, “Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ‘Share on Facebook’ links on sites that contain “any content that is infringing. Given the controversy surrounding The Pirate Bay and the pending lawsuit against them, we’ve reached out to The Pirate Bay and asked them to remove the ‘Share on Facebook’ links from their site. The Pirate Bay has not responded and so we have blocked their torrents from being shared on Facebook.”
Facebook users are not allowed to link to Pirate Bay torrents
Interestingly, links from thepiratebay.se are still accepted. The Pirate Bay’s Peter Sunde told TorrentFreak that this is plain censorship and said he will try to come up with a workaround so people can continue to share. “I’ll fix it later today so it will have a link to a redirect site or something,” he said.
Since Facebook’s Terms of Service forbid any acts of copyright infringement, the company wouldn’t generally be responsible for infringements committed by their users. However, just as a torrent site is expected to respond to DMCA takedown notices, so is Facebook. If, after being notified of an infringement Facebook fails to take action, it could itself become liable. Add this to the prospect of a growing administrative headache linked to a rising tide of DMCA takedown notices generated by TPB torrents, and Facebook probably decided it had enough grounds to justify a ban.
Facebook’s censorship policies are not very consistent though. Mininova and isoHunt, two other large BitTorrent sites remain unaffected, even though isoHunt offers the exact same ‘Share on Facebook’ feature as The Pirate Bay previously did.
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