Well that what happened to the guys behind piratebay. They weren’t responsible for the actual content, but they were still convicted since they made it possible. Right or wrong, sometimes how the tech actually work doesn’t matter.
The piratebay had direct access to their database index and deleting content was as easy as running "delete from torrents where torrent_hash='xyz'". This case is different, there is no way for openbazaar to delete remote nodes hosted by other people. It's like ordering Google to delete content hosted on someone else server, they can remove it from their index but the server would still be online accessible to all.
Well they weren’t convicted because they didn’t delete it, they were convicted because they made it available. The hash is still not the actual content, which were One of their actual argument in their case.
Depending on where you live there are serves cases where making things available is criminal. Have ISPs ordered to block domains etc. VPN is illegal in China etc.
> Well they weren’t convicted because they didn’t delete it, they were convicted because they made it available.
They did. The piratebay default search engine allowed people to find illegal content. That's why they got in trouble. If Google Chrome default search engine had CP and drugs on it, they'd get into trouble too. Anyone can use chrome to find CP but Google is ok because they don't enable it by default. As long as OpenBazaar default search engine does not contain anything illegal and forces people to use a different search engine to find illegal stuff, they will not get into trouble.
The law they broke was “assist in copyright infringement”, not that they actually broke “copyright infringement”. The law don’t care about the tech, it’s about the intentions.
The piratebay had a list of most popular keywords directly linking to illegal content. Also their very name _pirate_bay made them a target for bad intent. OpenBazaar doesn't link to or has anything in its name offering or encouraging illegal content. I used to work for isohunt by the way who got shut down by the MPAA and it was because of these details that they lost. If OpenBazaar never links to anything illegal and does not host hashes or any other data of anything illegal, then they'll be fine. Another point is that OpenBazaar is at least so far not profiting from anything illegal such as showing ads on pages featuring illegal content, that was a big point against bittorrent search engines.
