Why does hosting a magnet link make a torrent index 'illegal'? After all, you're not hosting any actual content on your server.
That's a very good question. I think that dialog in filesharing/linking court cases has moved from "link vs torrent vs file" issue to "does this site/person make possible bypassing copyright protection, and, if so, to what extent?" issue. Part of the torrent community still holds to the old (and comfortable, I must say) idea, that files and links (no matter in which form, http or magnet) are something fundamentally d…
It does seem like a slippery slope, though. Someone could argue that your site facilitates bypassing copyright for merely letting users know a particular torrent even exists. They would simply look it up by name in a torrent index that does share magnet links.
Thanks for the insight, and good luck with the website!