Probably not, but IANAL. In the world of big companies and even governments coming after you, it becomes hard to claim innocence when conspiracy charges are levied. Using things that enable further proliferation tend to add to the charges and make the case.

Chinese walls/firewalls don't quite hold up in court as well as one might think. Obviously it can depend on the country and circumstances, but anytime people feel there is a criminal conspiracy at work, they come up you hard. It is also hard to keep such a wall "clean" as all it takes is one person being stupid to establish a link.

Again, it's also about fear and human nature, not reality. I'm sure there are people with great opsec and planning who don't have this problem, but they also don't necessarily attract enough attention to get shut down. Factor in that many admins start a site because of ego, and that doesn't lead to great opsec. Nor do most people want to use software they know nothing about.

I should probably add FWIW, married to a prosecutor who goes after international criminal conspiracies among other things. Not the computer stuff thankfully, but I've seen and heard about what happens when the words criminal conspiracy get thrown about and people with money are involved. Doubly dangerous when extradition treaties exist or the country handling the case is a bigger power like the US.

I do feel like it'd be prudent to wait until everyone I love has died, before I even publicly speak about these issues. Power is not something we as a race have learned to tame, and we currently have a bunch of very powerful actors who hate piracy (and free-spirited citizens in general). You can call my fear paranoia, but is it that if you really are constantly being watched by the invisible eyes of powerful and ruthless interest groups and government agencies?

I do wonder how much cooperation there is between the copyright lobby and intelligence agencies. Their interests and arenas are very much alligned.

Chilling effects matter a lot, and that is part of the reason I do choose to speak up, though it gives me more anxiety than I'd like to have. I can't imagine what a hell it must be to run an actual illegal pirate network.

I don't blame you or think you are paranoid. I don't know as much as I like, but for various reasons ranging from family to work to my childhood, I've seen a fair amount of "stuff" in the world that at the very least makes me both cautious and skeptical.

The average person isn't really going to be targeted for most things though. What is scary sometimes is the recklessness that people exhibit when they do have powerful information about other people. That enables some of the bad actors, whether private citizens, criminal organizations, fraudsters, or otherwise to do bad things with the information. Gathering information is a dangerous thing even if used for noble purposes because it's very hard to guarantee it is used for that.

As far as cooperation between intelligence agencies and copyright lobby, again I can't say. My feeling and first-hand experiences have more been it's an indirect relationship at best. More that lobbies pressure people, who in turn pressure intelligence. That combined with negligence and sloppy information handling and operational security, and sometimes the wrong people are able to see information they shouldn't that was often for other purposes.

I'll never understand what makes corporations and the idea of nations make people act so irrationally and often evil. It's really not that hard in life, don't be an a-hole. If you have to ask yourself if you are doing the right thing, you probably aren't most of the time. Money has just become such a huge part of civilization that it becomes a primary motivator of behaviors for many people, and the results speak for themselves.

I could go on, but I'll leave it at money makes the world go round, and sometimes I feel we've just recreated things like serfdom, monarchy, divine right, and the whole family of awfulness like that in new forms.

This is pretty much what Popcorn Time does right now AFAIK. The development of the client and stuff are done under the "Butter Project" (which is completely legal, distributing only works that are free of copyrights), while popcorn time merely administers servers and replace the logos.

Yup, plenty of others examples. There's also more sort of "gray" examples of things like streaming sites that just "index" the streams that are on various servers and file sharing sites like openload.

It's always a matter of how much attention you grab and what people you piss off. Things can look like they are fine, legal, and alright, until they aren't. It's hard to know if a strategy works until it doesn't.

Beyond the perception issues I mentioned, all I am saying is that the legal issues tend to be somewhat volatile because what is legally or ethically correct isn't necessarily what happens in reality. Combine that with other motivators like politicians and deep pockets and it gets pretty scary.

I am glad my spouse works in what I would call a more moral side of prosecution that's hard to argue the other way. She can't and I can't say that entirely good things happen in other areas of prosecution like piracy and digital crimes. If someone wants to cause you trouble, they can often find a "way" or at the very least dig and bother enough until they invent something or shake things up to find something. The cost of a legal battle alone sometimes is its own form of extortion and can be a deterrent. Gross behavior, but it happens.