Laws for black hat websites.

A forum I will be launching in the next week, could attract some black hat users, seems how the word "l33t" is in the domain name. It is in the rules and TOS, that no black hat activity can be posted. I do however, have a friend that ran a black hat website a year or so ago. It got shutdown, and he got into legal trouble.

I know of a hacking forum that has right at 300,000 members. The owner is very intelligent, and owns over 50 premium domains. He is also the owner of mybbcenetral. He writes his own plugins etc. He claims it is not a blackhat website but..... lol...... I would say over 65% of the content (300k members) is black hat.

I just don't want to get into any legal trouble if blackhat activity is posted on my forum. After I get things setup as planned, it would be impossible for my partner and I to moderate everything.

 

It all kind of depends what you call 'blackhat'. SEO? Then no, you're probably never going into legal trouble for it, the only worry would be Google banning a site promoting it.

Hacking? Kind of depends. If you're doing something classed as outright illegal like breaking into others servers or stealing/selling credit cards you probably won't last particularly long. If you're hosting illegal content against copyright/trademark laws you might last long but get just as sued if caught.

Then again, you could cynically say it depends less on what you host than it does where you're currently based and where the server's based. If someone was in China or Russia or the middle east or part of Africa or whatever then they'd probably not get shut down regardless of what was hosted on the site.

 

I would just recommend going offshore completely...to give you better protection.

Netherlands, Russia, etc etc.

 

The host and I are in the USA. I think offshore would be my best bet in the future when I get some money going.
And no, theres no credit card selling or anything like that lol. Somebody might post some hacking material though.