Reddit's /r/Piracy is deleting almost ten years of history to avoid ban
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
Copyright claims are super easy to make at scale, but the platforms themselves cannot investigate at scale, meaning the small guy suffers. Yes, redditers who are truly infringing should have their posts removed, but the result of trigger-happy, likely bot controled complaints is having an effect on legal speech.
Here's a fun point though - the DMCA is draconian partly because platforms like Youtube enabled mass piracy in order to capture market share when they were small. The costs of Youtube's illegal activity early on is now being passed on to their users today.
I could rephrase your statement as "...the more people understand why the idea of granting exclusive rights to an intellectual concept is stupid". I suspect it doesn't materially change your feeling on the subject, but it's important to discuss these things as they really are, or else people will just dismiss your argument without thinking about it.
This here clearly shows what Germans have known for years thanks to our stupid "Abmahnwesen" legal abnormality: enforcement is not the bottleneck when private entities sue other private entities. It won't be a Hadopi-style government institution petitioning $youtube to take down any videos at the threat of a mild fine. It will be $sony suing the crap out of $youtube with the prospect of millions and millions in reparations. There is zero reason to believe they will be anything less than maximally-aggressive in doing so, and so they will provide all the incentive $youtube needs to block everything that has a hint of a smell of copyrighted material.
And bear in mind, the EU regulation defines $youtube in a way that potentially includes most small forum operators, virtually every community built by a small corporation etc. And there's equally no reason to believe those will be spared by the copyright industry and their lawyers.
This has been a surprisingly common view in France* for a long time. I consider it an unfortunate attitude that breeds cynicism and allows laws to be passed that simply express a desire, rather than laws that might make things better. I understand there can be protest exhaustion and one has to pick one's battles.
* I mention France by name only because the only European countries I've lived in are France and Germany.
People are unaware.
It's the EU, so the law being divorced from reality is to be expected.
In the end though, it is the ECJ that will decide if your head canon has any relevance for this topic.
They don't have to investigate. They could simply follow the procedure given in the DMCA.
1. Rights holder sends a notice claiming infringement and meeting the various requirements for such a notice given in the DMCA.
2. The service provider removes the material and promptly notifies the user who put the material up.
3. The user can file a counter notice, disputing that the material infringes.
4. The service provider passes the counter notice back to the rights holder. If the rights holder does not file an infringement lawsuit against the user within 14 days, the service provider puts the material back up.
If they do this, this gets the service provider off the hook for liability to the rights holder if it turns out that the work infringes, and it gets them off the hook for any liability to the user if it turns out that the work does not infringe.
A rights holder could send notices for ridiculous things, like things that are obviously fair use, but unless they are willing to actually go to court they will just get counter notices for most and the material will go back up.
The sites that have implemented their own systems that take down upon any claim and make it hard or impossible for the poster to dispute this are going way beyond what the law requires them to do.
There need to be severe consequences for claiming everything.
Such freedom seems so essential to Internet culture that, in my opinion, it must be protected.
Can you provide an example of something valuable you found on 4chan/8chan that could not be found on a site with less "vileness"?
That is a polite way of describing anti-Semitism and conspiracy theories such as Q-Anon.
The experience I found on 4chan is pretty unique, and I don't know how well I can describe it, but I'm really glad that there was somewhere like it.
That said, 4chan's culture definitely started to decline around 2014~2015ish, around the time of Gamergate and the Trump campaign. Whenever 4chan's "hub of vileness" reputation starts getting really public in the news, the result is that a bunch of new people who think "hey, that sounds like exactly my jam!" start flooding in. And those two events both drew a huge amount of attention to 4chan, and not the kind of attention that brings good people. (It didn't help that a huge chunk of the old userbase fled around the time of Gamergate due to controversies about it on the site itself.) /pol/ was always a little leaky, but it started to get a lot worse around that time. Not to mention that /tg/ itself was already on the decline because of the positive reputation it had gained elsewhere on the Internet as various stories originally found on it were posted elsewhere, and so it increasingly became full of people who wanted to hear those kinds of stories but weren't actually RPG players themselves. There's a lot less positive to recommend the site these days, and a lot more negative.
Also greentexts.
I get both from elsewhere, but they originate on 4chan.
Ok admittedly, this was 10 years ago and 4chan was a much different place (as was the internet at large). I was younger and spent a lot of (read: too much) time on 4chan back then.
At the very beginning of Minecraft, before it was even a thing, Notch would post on /v/ about it almost daily - incorporating changes/suggestions/criticisms people would fling at him anonymously and randomly. No one thought it would be huge - it was just fun. And Notch was so receptive.
I can't help but think his current Alt-Right views may have been influenced by his exposure to 4chan, but in those days it wasn't as crazy as it is now.
I have a 4 year old daughter now who LOVES Minecraft. And personally, it's been valuable to me, and I am utterly convinced that had Minecraft not been developed in its earliest days on 4chan, it might not have gotten to where it is today.
*Small shoutout also to Katawa Shojo - also made with lots of input from 4chan, which turned out to be quite a compleling VN game.
What has 4chan done lately that is valuable? That I couldn't tell you.
For example, couldn't Notch post on Reddit every day, incorporating changes/suggestions/criticisms people would fling at him anonymously and randomly?
Is there something about 4chan/8chan that is intrinsically better for building Minecraft that isn't available anywhere else?
I'm convinced the initial randomness/anonymous feedback/chaos of that initial period helped grow the spark from the ember that split off of Infiniminer.
There is something creative in the chaos of 4chan - just look a greentexts. 99% of them are absolutely terrible. But the occasional gem catches on and made viral on the larger, less vile sites.
Also, I can't believe I forgot about Caturday. That started on 4chan as well. (also 10+ years ago).
This is the usual pattern in online discussion platforms. Start free, advocate for free speech, then figure out you need to make money and you suddenly stop being a rebel and sink down to be the corporate sellout you always preached against. Reddit will eventually be replaced by something else and the cycle continues.
as a counterexample: in this case, r/piracy (and reddit more generally) could (in theory, and increasingly in practice) be replaced by p2p tech, which would simply not be controllable, nor have any incentive to appease advertisers.
a different example: you could say the same about healthcare providers. a medical startup could displace an established provider, then turn around and push the same rent extraction BS on their customers. Socialized healthcare (while it has its own problems for sure) will not follow the same rules.
Read: if something seems sucky yet inevitable, you're probably not questioning enough of your assumptions.
There are lots of subject matter discussion platforms that never go trough this phase as a natural consequence of having primary concerns that isn't simply growing MAU numbers.
And the turn to being shitty is often caused by the need to appease investors as you go for your next round of funding. But it seems that the patronage model is now offering substantial pro-consumer alternatives to the VC-backed model (growth at all costs, choke all competition with deep pockets).
I mean, banning watch-people-die is obviously because they are trying to be somehow attracting more advertisers, being more profit-friendly, but they never condoned copyright infringement as far as I know.
Edit: Looks like it was the AACS key (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD) was the key that set all this off, not CSS.
How did you find such valuable servers? Could you guide me.
what's your interest? I might be able to point you to a few
Most of my interests revolves around business, masterminds, entrepreneurship, freelancing etc.
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7Q...
As a result, you'd still lose a lot of content, for example all the images stored in imgur. Is there a way to solve this ?
I guess you could run the archive tool with some extra parameters to grab external content, but it will substantially increase the archive size.
Though you may need to do some work to extract what you want from the mass of data, and won't get the latest information.
These are kind of going mainstream and must be a huge thorn in the side of cable companies
Edit: of course, not everyone is happy about this. There is definitely a culture mismatch between most of the (current) ssb community and r/piracy.
Until no alternative to unique source of streaming with a single account shows up, I 'm not going to pay for every streaming service
Oh, censorship hasn't actually achieved those things, you say? Then why the fuck are we tolerating its coordinated resurgence?!
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. The same old authoritarian bullshit that jumpstarted reddit can now end it. It is once again time to move on to new pastures, ideally ones that can't just flip the censorship switch in the future.
Reddit was a nice idea, but it just got too big. Either it has to take responsibility for its users' content, and act as an editor/publisher, or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue.
The only things that have changed is that the payment processors have decided to leverage their business in a play to control speech, and that there is a good contingent of users cheering on the resulting censorship push in a shortsighted fantasy of making people better.
The latter is what I take issue with. Sure, it's really just that ignorant pop(ulist) culture has usurped the Internet. And yes that itself was unfortunately inevitable. But it's not Internet culture and there should be more uniform condemnation and outrage from the traditionally marginalized communities who took to the Internet earlier, rather than mental gymnastics justifying how censorship is great when it's deployed against today's undesirables.
Huh?
None of these platforms got established as primarily long tail platforms. They were meant to be potentially big with lowest common denominators (news, aggregation, social connection in education communities) and grow into niches.
Niche are topical forums and topical social networks.
hey what do we pay gold for then :(
Oh, traffic control hasn't actually eliminated every fatality? Then why the fuck are we tolerating stop signs and police citations?
So they are not "victims", just a bit inconsiderate. And there is no reason to blame reddit, or anyone, for the deletion. They are not obliged to provide their service to anyone.
> So not unreasonable to blame them when they change their mind in the name of Ads. That change of mind was a part of their business model. Why blaming people for making legal businesses?
The problem is in people who trust "free" services and expect the terms to remain the same forever.
It's exactly this attitude that has a chilling effect on all speech, no matter the subject. You should be ashamed.
No, it isn't. The lack of precaution and inability to decently set up a forum software is.
To wit, you've got a good point about the importance of autonomy and independence. But no one is rushing to defend your position here because you've sprinkled in a few unsympathetic value judgments and absolute claims along the way.
Doesn't seem inherently bad to me. It would be bad if it were for your own commerical benefit but if done for the preservation of culture for example it could be justified. If we couldn't copy CD's some music or video games might be lost forever -- even though copying is forbidden by the licence.
Rights holders only do the absolute minimum to preserve the culture they own, countless movies available in the commercial space are the worst quality versions of those movies and people passionate about those movies will go as far as tracking down multiple versions to take the picture quality of one, cut scenes from another, the sound from another and the subtitles from a fourth to make definitive best image, best sound, no cuts version and they do all that for free.
I mean, this is not just true, but even more clearly so when you look at things beyond the (fairly niche and not legally sanctioned) 'piracy' scene. There is solid scholarship showing that content which has entered the public domain is far better preserved and accrues far more references, compared to very similar content which is still copyright-encumbered. So it is clearly the case that, while having some copyright is likely good for culture, we have way more of it at present than would be justified.
I’m pretty sure you two are in complete agreement.
All that needs to be eradicated is the obsolete middle-men acting as gatekeepers to our shared culture for profit.
> The scope of music collected on What.cd was almost incomprehensibly vast: More than a million distinct “releases” of songs, albums, and bootlegs.
> Bach cello suites. Obscure Chinese indie rock. Nigerian hip-hop. Thai psych-funk from the 1970s. Every release of Miles Davis’ Kind of Blue, including vinyl rips and remasters. UK techno tracks that were pressed on vinyl in the 90s, with only a few hundred copies made, and uploaded by dedicated crate-diggers.
> The collections of Spotify and Apple Music may seem infinite, but What.cd had thousands of albums that were not available anywhere else—and now, are not available anywhere at all. The site had about 800,000 artists as of early 2016...
from https://qz.com/840661/what-cd-is-gone-a-eulogy-for-the-great...
In fact, once something enters the public domain, copying it, consuming it, drawing attention to it, documenting it, analysing it, archiving it, reusing it, in short, using it; is absolutely vital to keep those facets of culture a part of our heritage. And it is completely legal.
But between the public domain and the moment cultural artefacts are created is a vast gap where copyright shields everything from those acts, even when nobody is monetizing it, and when all that stands between losing it forever and maintaining it for future generations is a couple of pirates who ripped a copy at an opportune moment.
The current copyright status quo is killing culture. 28 years of copyright protects the creator, life plus 100 years just protects the profits of some faceless megacorporation or rent-seeking artist's estate.
If anything piracy is essential to the survival of culture. The more we barricade our works into locked off walled gardens the more likely we are to lose them. The music piracy scene is a large reason why a lot of music is still around today.
Bands and Artists whither away and die but the music lives on. How do you make that happen when all the music is locked behind DRM on streaming services?
Likewise goes for gaming communities that have reverse engineered the online services for long dead games. It's cracking and its piracy to distribute these games but they maintain vibrant communities for abandoned games.
I fear that with the increased reliance on streaming services, other gated content providers, and the increased effort to force copyright compliance that a lot of what we consume nowadays will become lost internet history.
> If anything piracy is essential to the survival of culture.
The book pirating scene is poor though. Outside of YA best-sellers and the usual K. Dick and Pratchett there isn't much to pirate if you are into anything not completely maintstream.
Looking at my paper books; Pooley's Flight Guide 1985; FIDO - Flying Through Fog; The Engineering History of the North of Ireland. Just three volumes out of thousands that are slowly slipping into oblivion.
The long tail of the Internet is not long enough to preserve all knowledge, particularly at the rate libraries are discarding old and 'unwanted' books.
Mind you this is the kind of book I buy, even in ePub format.
I can picture it...sorry Mr. Picasso great artists don't steal...they go straight to jail. Besides, your art ain't all that. Mr. Mozart, we are sorry to inform you that Symphony No. 37 violates Mr. Haydn's intellectual property and has to be removed from the musical canons for all eternity (just like pretty much all of Mr. Händel's work)
Arguably the greatest US piece of music culture (Jazz) would be banned completely because it's the worst possibly offense. Live streaming piracy with no shame.
etc. pp.
Piracy is also the only way a lot of us can get access to content, georestrictions are a huge annoyance for far too many of us literally no way to get paid access for years and years and years. That's not fair treatment.