Copyright Law

Facebook Blocks Pirate Bay BitTorrent Links

By soulxtc

BitTorrent tracker site’s “Share on Facebook” button links now getting censored.

Back on Mar 30th I reported how The Pirate Bay had added a cool new “Share on Facebook” feature that allowed you to share torrent tracker links from the popular Swedish BitTorrent site with family and friends.

Now it appears the feature is being disabled by Facebook which has begun blocking the “bookmarklets” along with any other links from The Pirate Bay.

?Facebook respects copyrights and our Terms of Service prohibits placement of ?Share on Facebook? links on sites that contain ?any content that is infringing,” the social networking site told TF. “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.?

Sunde contends Facebook is unfairly censoring content. “Now they are deciding what you and your friends can talk about, which is quite annoying,” he said.

I’m not sure how popular the feature really became with BitTorrent users being that file-sharing protocol does require a certain amount of technical savvy not always characteristic of most people’s family and friends. But, it was nonetheless a cool option that helped The Pirate Bay distinguish itself from other public tracker sites.

Either way it was just a matter of time before Facebook began blocking the feature, and I’m not sure it’s a fight that favors The Pirate Bay.

Full post as published by ZeroPaid on April 09, 2009 (boomark / email).