YouTube is also forcing the popular Rythm Discord music bot offline

theverge.com

11 points·julietteeb··5 comments

I understand why people are upset about this, but TBH, everyone knew it was coming and everyone knew it was illegal, at least where Discord is based (and presumably where the servers are), when you're violating both the ToS of multiple services simultaneously and not being appropriately licenced to do public broadcasting nor paying royalties for such.

It's pretty shitty, but that's a reflection on the state of copyright in the states - this isn't Discord's fault, and this isn't Google or YouTube's fault, and there is not really anything they can do to make it acceptable short of people changing copyright laws. (NB: I am not a fan of the way things are, just merely making an objective statement here)

I'm more surprised that the only thing they asked was a shutdown when these bot owners were collecting large amounts of monthly payments for nothing but delivering their own ads and pirated music.

I never even thought about the legality haha. Love this bot, will be sad when it's gone.

You can probably get away with running your own (there a ton of open source ones, they are extremely simple to write and just a ffmpeg pipe) for your own servers.

I'd imagine these named ones in particular were looked into further because they were straight up collecting monthly fees for content they don't own or have the right to use. And adding ads for their own "premium bots" in every single message the bot sends. And gating features like volume behind $9/m plans.

Feels like they’re now doing this since, they are in plans to integrate with Discord. May be all these days discord had some arrangement with google to allow music bots till they can build their own integration.

I'm no fan of Google but this does seem like pretty blatant piracy.

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