As some readers will be aware, earlier this month a Danish court ordered the Internet Service Provider Tele2 to block it’s users’ access to the bittorrent-sharing site The Pirate Bay. Mike Masnick sums it up pretty well.
One may very well wonder (as Masnick does too), if The Pirate Bay, which is essentially a search engine and consists of nothing but metadata, should be blocked, other search engines where one may find torrent-files leading to copyright-infringing material ought to be blocked too. Now Mikkel DeMib Svendsen, renowned Danish SEO-expert, internet entrepreneur and columnist, has responded in kind, to illustrate precisely this point. His column is available here, in Danish only, but his point transcends all languages.
Torrent Search is simply a custom search engine built using Google’s own tools, which trawls all of Google’s index for torrent files. DeMib’s point being of course to illustrate the absurdity of the block and of the court’s findings. If The Pirate Bay should be blocked, so should Google. And so should every other search engine or index of metadata, which allows one to find hyperlinks to material, which someone deems infringing on someone’s copyrights.
