By Mick Masnike
Special to YNOT

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. – How many times has this happened to you: You’re surfing links on ThePirateBay, just looking for a decent, currently-in-theaters movie to watch without having to line the pockets of some (probably racist) Hollywood movie mogul and — whammo!! — suddenly there’s porn all over the place, totally ruining Pirated Movie Night for the whole family.

Well, today there’s good news for all you decent, morally upstanding content-liberators out there, because an ethical genius by the name of “MrClean” has created a mirror of the world’s most popular torrent site with all the porn filtered out.

According to MrClean, he cooked up the idea for TPBCLean after several Indian developers declined to work on a TPB-related project due to all the porn available on the platform.

“Over fifty percent of those contacted refused to work on the project, not for copyright-related reasons, but because they didn’t want to work on a project that had any links with adult content,” MrClean told TorrentFreak. “Since TPB is now the biggest torrent site again, I figured there might be people with similar feelings toward adult content that would appreciate a clean version of the bay.”

See, Hollywood? This is how you deal with TPB; don’t try to sue it into submission, just produce a mirror without all the content to which you object. Problem solved!

Granted, if someone were to mirror TPB minus the copyrighted content thereon, it would somewhat reduce the size of the index, from several billion links to approximately sixteen of them. On the plus side, though, not even the greedy bastards at the MPAA and RIAA could accuse that manner of TPB clone of costing their industries billions of dollars per year, right?

Personally, I’d like to see MrClean extend his purgative campaign to include all other torrent trackers, link sites and file lockers, as well. In addition to being personally offended by porn, I’m really tired of having to counsel my kids on why it’s OK to download The Magnificent Seven before it hits the theaters, but not OK to download The Magnificent 7” under any circumstances.

I’m sure some of you copyright extremists and anti-piracy zealots will scoff at MrClean and his sanitized TPB proxy, claiming what’s really indecent is all us freedom-of-information enthusiasts and try-before-you-buyers having unfettered access to digital content you “paid to produce.”

Copyright extremists and Big Hollywood bootlickers, do I really have to explain all of this to you, again? I guess I do.

The same First Amendment that gives you the right to produce content in the first place protects my right to express my desire not to pay for said content by downloading it from a torrent site.

That’s just Intellectual Property Law 101, people — you know, so long as we’re not talking about the absurd, backwards kind of Intellectual Property Law 101 taught at one of those archaic, ill-informed, stultifying, freedom-killing old “law schools” the 1% insists on people attending before bestowing upon them the honor to defend all our Constitutional rights in an actual court of law.

As for you free porn hounds who might decry MrClean’s efforts for more personal-pleasure-related reasons, don’t fret: I’m sure the original TPB site will remain steadfast in its commitment to deliver all the best porn money can’t didn’t have to buy.

For the rest of us, TPBClean is a welcome arrival: A tidy, morally-intact marketplace where any and every idea can go to be free…so long as it keeps its clothes on.

Mick Masnike isn’t a lawyer, but if you read his blog, you’d be hard-pressed to think he’s anything but an absolute expert on intellectual property law, as opposed to someone who would like to see IP law obliterated from the roots up, thereby making it easier for him to enjoy the fruits of other peoples’ labor without having to pay the price of admission.