The Butt Ugly Weblog

Harry Potter is on Bittorrent, OMG.

Much to nobody's surprise, the new Harry Potter book is already available for download from a multitude of Bittorrent trackers. It's in the form of badly scanned pages, but still, it's available.

In a move which equally fails to surprise anyone, the publishers are demanding that any page which talks about the fact that its available on Bittorrent is infringing their copyrights. The fun thing is that the story in question does not even link to the torrent, it just mentions the name of the site from which you can find a torrent link to the actual download.

So, theoretically, me linking to the story of the takedown notice - which links to the original story, which mentions the name of the site from which you can find a torrent link to the actual download - could be considered, in some twisted universe, a copyright infringement.

Just don't mention in a pub that you saw this entry in an RSS feed on some other site talking about a takedown notice linking to a story which mentions the name of the site from which you can find a torrent link to the actual download. You never know who is listening.