Is linking to but not hosting pirated content legal to me?

Question

Lets say i have a blog, and it offers music reviews. and at the bottom of the review it says listen to the song here: and has a download link for the song that is hosted on somebody elses server, can i get into any legal hot water?

Basically if your linking to but not hosting the pirated content, is that legal to you?

Answer 1

If I were you I'd play it safe and don't do it.  It's borderline.  

Answer 2

The laws on such things are a bit vague, but it could be considered to be aiding and abetting under certain circumstances. I'm not a lawyer yet, so I can't give legal advice. If you want to make sure your website is in legal compliance, hire a lawyer. If you're looking for in-house counsel, incidentally, I'm available and I'll be admitted to practice in New York and Massachusetts soon, hopefully.

Answer 3

Yes - look at piratebay - they merely provide the torrent files for people to download. None of the torrent data is physically located on their servers. Yet the US govt would shut them down in a second if they had US based servers (which they don't)