Let's get one thing straight: Torrent sites <i>do not host content</i>. They host <i>community</i>.<p>The only thing thepiratebay.org, what.cd, kickasstorrents.cr, etc. did or continue to do is the <i>same</i> that a forum or news site like reddit or hackernews does: provide a community with a purpose.<p>While hackernews is a community for discussing news or interesting things, etc. WhatCD was a place for discussing music, quality releases, and sharing good encodings, rather than the transcoded lossy->lossy formats you see flying around most places. Naturally, WhatCD's <i>as a community</i> wasn't concerned with things like copyright owner's profits, etc., even though many of its users certainly were, but <i>simply couldn't find an alternative</i>, as a lot of music is not even to be found, let alone sold in particularly high quality lossless formats.<p>When what.cd was taken down, <i>none</i> of the copies of <i>copyrighted content</i> were deleted. The <i>community</i> was broken up.<p>If piracy is to be considered such a serious crime, taking down torrent trackers is like going to a meeting of known criminals, and - rather than arresting them - evicting them. It has only a minimal effect, as they are free to gather elsewhere.<p>What bothers me the most is that the only thing being dismantled is the thing that clearly contains the most value to individuals, and society at large. Community is a <i>good thing</i>.<p>When WhatCD was taken down, a countless amount of valuable data that could be found practically nowhere else was suddenly destined to be hidden from society at large, and the community it had cultivated was scattered, without a care for what that meant.<p>Sure, quite a few people find that, while using copyright enforcement as a business model, piracy significantly detracts from sales. Sure, there is a culture that undervalues creators, but it is not a black and white problem, and most popular solutions have serious consequences that go practically ignored.