Yeah I understand that, but obviously explicitly linking to the content is enough to get you an IRL ban hammer. Seems like there should be a happy middle ground where you can provide the metadata and keep the actual links on "burner" sites that can be easily replicated when taken down.
Lots of private trackers already do this by essentially importing their metadata from websites like discogs. They import that data into their databases so that it's available, but then they end up expanding on it themselves for things that are being shared that aren't in those databases.
He meant further decoupling the torrents, not the metadata. Obviously you need the metadata to come from your users and community, not just 3rd party providers. Otherwise what would be the point?
The wealth of the metadata present in what.cd that represents years of work far surpassed anything available in public 3rd party sites.
Exactly. Anyone starting a community like this should be planning for plausible deniability from the beginning. You can build a metadata community that is seamlessly interoperable with a tracker without actually containing any links to the tracker. Think something like trakt.tv, but make the IDs on the metadata site match the IDs on the torrent site and otherwise completely firewall the two. Different owners, different infrastructure, etc. I don't see how a community that simply collects data and ratings can be shut down.
So theoretically, if I made a torrent site where the torrent IDs were all IMDB IDs, is IMDB a torrent tracker? My comment above was mostly thinking-out-loud, but I was assuming that there wouldn't be any concrete link between the community site and the tracker.
