Internet Archive takes down upload of BBC’s Modi documentary | Hacker News Reader

Internet Archive takes down upload of BBC’s Modi documentary

thehindu.com

169 pointswebmobdev67 comments

Try to upload the latest Avatar film to Internet Archive and it will be taken down as well. This particular one is being called out to generate online outrage, nothing more.

I am sure the US government doesn't initiate the request to take down Avatar.

This could just be a simple copyright situation.

Definitely is. I've tried watching and uploading more recent BBC documentaries onto platforms like Youtube and YouTube would be quickly to remove said copyright violation. It's deplorable how moneygrubbing the BBC has become while also being penny pinched. Heck, most of their more recent documentaries seem require partial co-producing with WGBH (PBS Boston) or KQED (PBS Bay Area) because stuff's expensive now. A sad financialization of a public good. Thank goodness Vietnam doesn't extradite and that there seems to be some organized crime nexus there around pirate streaming, otherwise all the pirate sites would have gone down.

It's likely not, per German newspaper Heise the Indian government has banned links to the movie under emergency powers, but it's not really clear why the IA copy got deleted [1].

[1] https://www.heise.de/news/Per-Notfallgesetz-Indien-sperrt-Mo...

If it was removed from youtube or IA based on the emergency laws, I'd be able to access them here in the US. Youtube would have invoked geoblocking to go in line with Indian regulations. The fact that the documentaries were deleted across 2 very distinct jurisdictions points to overzealous copyright management by the BBC

It's worth noting there's quite a distinct separation between the BBC and BBC Studios (which used to be called BBC Worldwide). The BBC is publicly funded via the UK's TV license. BBC Studios is entirely funded by its own profit. They're very careful to maintain the gap between the two. It's why so many BBC Studios productions can't be viewed on BBC's streaming platform domestically; the rights are managed and sold separately. It's not surprising to see partnerships with other production houses across their core markets.

That, actually makes sense. And explains why I can still watch older BBC docs (pre-2012) that were ripped onto youtube. Didn't the airgapping become much more strict when the Tories started pushing the "BBC profitability" schtick?

Seems like a distinction without a difference.

Just like Sesame Workshop making millions off of merchandising Sesame Street characters that were created with tax dollars from PBS and local PBS stations.

And then, to make it even worse, new episodes of the program that was created with tax dollars to educate poor young people for free is now only available first-run to non-poor kids who subscribe to one particular streaming service.

Are you a poor child? Tough. You can watch the reruns a few weeks later. Reruns of the shows that were funded with your parents' tax dollars.

It might be deplorable but it's totally expected - the BBC is constantly starved of money by Murdoch-friendly governments, so it had to find alternative income streams.

I'd be happy to pay a TV license fee 100% higher than it is now, in exchange for a really-universal and non-profit BBC. I'd also be happy for Parliament to inject more money into it. Would you...?

I didn't want to watch this before, but now I'm _REALLY_ interested in seeing what it's about.

Streisand Effect, here I come.

https://peertube.su/w/f15x5ghHXocFUL1bJk21Af

peertube link for those not in UK

wow. this is being downvoted like hell. why? you don't like views contrary to what the bug brother wants to project? fuck you

Link on iPlayer (UK only, I believe): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0dk9z6x/episodes/player

I wouldn't have been too interested in it before, but I sure am going to watch it now.

magnet link

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:3C378A82CF67A1107523CA6C647077403A1EF74D&dn=India+The+Modi+Question+S01E01+1080p+HDTV+H264-DARKFLiX&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.coppersurfer.tk%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.openbittorrent.com%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.opentrackr.org%3A1337&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.leechers-paradise.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.dler.org%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Fopentracker.i2p.rocks%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F47.ip-51-68-199.eu%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.internetwarriors.net%3A1337%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2F9.rarbg.to%3A2920%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.pirateparty.gr%3A6969%2Fannounce&tr=udp%3A%2F%2Ftracker.cyberia.is%3A6969%2Fannounce

You can just post the hash portion of it. For a public torrent like this the trackers are effectively interchangeable and it makes for a messy, hard to copy URL.

Another article with some context: https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/23/business-india/india-modi-bbc...

BBC's iPlayer is not letting me watch while connected to a VPN but this other link I found doesn't seem to care where you are

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:F80DE3863CBFAA6465FDEC1B80777B7AA144C58D

FYI The second (of two) episodes airs later today.

Perfect example of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Streisand_effect

this "documentary" has already been on all national news in India for past 2-3 days, so this is not an example of Streisand effect. Most people who turn on TV once a day are aware of this.

Well, now everyone outside of India wants to watch it as well.

They won't let me read it with duckduck browser (claims it is due to an ad blocker). Not only are we suffering through a horrid application platform (browser, javascript and html) but the content on the web is super picky about how you view it. Broken AF. Janky shit.

Thanks, I just Torrented S01E01

You can definitely find entire BBC documentaries that have been uploaded to IA; there's an account named "BBC Video" that has nearly 1,000 videos uploaded [0]. However, not all the videos look like BBC content, and there's really no indicator that this account is actually affiliated with BBC. Its undisturbed existence on IA may be a result of the BBC not being particularly worried about the impact of IA's unauthorized distribution of its content.

IA still seems to handle a lot of content moderation scenarios in a manual, old-fashioned sense, e.g. responding to direct requests by email, as opposed to having built out a form-based process. The article says it's unclear who requested the takedown. If the BBC did indeed ask for it on copyright grounds, it's possible that the current error message ("Items may be taken down for various reasons, including by decision of the uploader or due to a violation of our Terms of Use") is the catch-all message for all takedowns.

If that's the case, it's probably time for IA to come up with a copyright-specific takedown message, so that relatively routine requests (e.g. BBC asserting ownership of copyrighted material) aren't conflated with much more nefarious scenarios (e.g. the suspicion that India's government is trying to censor damaging content)

[0] https://archive.org/search?query=creator%3A%22BBC+Video%22

It all seems to be old VHS uploads so for sure it's not official.

Note that archive.org is not an immutable store, and never has been. Website owners have always been able to ask for pages to be removed, personal data can be removed, and copyright holders can also ask to remove things.

I've had mixed results with that. If I add a robots.txt entry to deny them, they do appear to stop displaying the cached content but then if long after the original content is gone from my site if I also park the domain and forget to maintain the robots.txt entry the cached content starts showing again meaning they never actually got rid of it but rather paused displaying it.

India.The.Modi.Question.S01E01.1080p.WEBRip.x264-SKYFiRE or India.The.Modi.Question.S01E01.1080p.HDTV.H264-DARKFLiX have got you covered, though I am sure there are other sources as well.

The Internet Archive does good work, but disappointingly appears to stop short of being a true "write-once, read-forever" archive. Your personal datastore is the only safe place.

There's supposed to be a second episode too. Anyone know a release name for that? Maybe it's not out yet, haven't checked.

The second episode appears to have appeared in the last few hours.

IA, WikiPedia and even arXiv are known to delete important data, sadly. I mean, you can't turn down CIA, can you?

I feel that India has been getting more and more authoritarian recently. What is happening over there?

Is there any place on the entire planet that _hasn't_ become more authoritarian in the past, say, 5 years?

Everything’s fine here in Switzerland so far.

Can I move there? (not rich :) )

You have to find a company that would convince the authorities that they have been looking for qualified workforce on the Swiss/EU market and were not been able to find anyone suitable in 6 months thus you deserve a visa.

Google still has some open positions in Zürich!

meh, just keep your existing remote WFH job, but have your home be in Zürich. You might need to work some offset hours to keep your meetings. Now, you're just on a tourist visa. Check it out for however long your tourist visa allows, and then if you don't actually like, it's a lot easier to leave. One step closer to being a digital nomad

> Google still has some open positions

> Google

Um... no, thanks )

> meh, just keep your existing remote WFH job

I'm currently ~1k eur/month (altough remote), and I doubt that's a survivable amount for .ch. And a tourist visa is kinda not something could save my life now. If available, at all.

Well yiz only gave women the vote in 1971...so the reactionary backlash hasn't yet had time to work itself out.

Not exactly; in 1971, it was for one last standing half-canton. On federal level and for most other cantons, women were allowed to vote long ago.

Sadly, women rights are a recent development in many recent countries. In Spain in 1975, women weren’t allowed to open their own bank accounts, for example. There are many other sad historical examples, and modern examples too :(

>In Spain in 1975, women weren’t allowed to open their own bank accounts, for example.

Well, guess why.

Except the country spend a lot of energy trying to defend Russian oligarchs in their banking systems and preventing Ukraine from getting supplies. A « neutrality » that somehow seems to fall a lot on the side of Russia.

You could make a pretty good argument for Saudi Arabia.

The place that hacked a journalist into pieces?

Yeah, but have they hacked a journalist to pieces lately. No, but seriously, they have become more open in recent years, the most visible change of which is that women can drive.

it happened in october 2018 and was ordered by the current de facto ruler

From a very low base maybe

Chile is currently in the process of rewriting its constitution to ensure civil liberties, indigenous rights, and so on. They recently legalized same-sex marriage etc.

Religious Nationalism, specifically Hindu Nationalism.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Religious_nationalism

John Oliver did a segment about Modi two years ago [1]. tl;dw: Religious-nationalist bullshit.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qVIXUhZ2AWs

It is more complex than that, but hey, we needed another Englishman to tell how to run India.

An Americanized Brit to boot!

It's not drastically more authoritarian than it ever was. Indian democracy has always had a strongly authoritarian streak legislatively. The key difference is that it is difficult to unlock this level of authoritarianism unless you have a supermajority in Parliament, which basically didn't happen from the early 1990s-2016. 2016-Present is a re-repeat of the 1970s-1989, but with less guns.

That said, the end of the BJP majority is near. Traditionally strongly BJP states have started voting for regional parties or opposition national parties (though tbf those parties have also started embracing the Development+Hinduvta+Freebies model BJP leveraged in 2019). You know the BJP High Command is worrying when Modi gave a speech 2 days ago to the party leadership about the need to build a dedicated campaign to lure Pasmanda (OBC/lower caste Muslims) in the same way Modi leveraged OBC Hindu votes in 2012. That will cause the grand coalition within the BJP between the Janta Party types and the RSS types to start fracturing.

Really feel like alot of answers to this question are more influenced by the commenter's own partisan affiliation within their own country. India's BJP seems to be used as a proxy for conservatism in Western liberal publications, and so their critiques of BJP tend to act as critiques of the right-wing parties in their own countries.

Nothing unusual.

Since 1947, every Prime Minister has found some way to censor and ban whatever they don't like.

The first PM - Jawahar Lal Nehru - banned a certain musical instrument from state radio as he personally disliked it. He also introduced the 1st amendment to our constitution which ironically is the exact opposite of the US 1st amendment. Ours allows the government to ban any speech!

This was because someone wrote an article critical of him personally.

His daughter, Indira Gandhi (no relation to Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi better known as "Mahatma Gandhi"), took this to another level, introducing drastic censorship during an "Emergency" which was triggered by her election being nullified by a court.

So, all this is pretty much par for the course.

> The first PM - Jawahar Lal Nehru - banned a certain musical instrument from state radio as he personally disliked it.

That is false. It was rather yet another colonial endeavour:

"In 1940, the harmonium was banned from All-India Radio, theretofore the largest single employer of harmoniumists in India. John Foulds, a prolific composer and the European music director of All-India Radio, Delhi, was largely responsible for this ban. [...] In 1938 Foulds published an article called “The Harmonium” in which he suggested that it be banned because its tuning was incompatible with Indian classical music. Echoing a term coined by fellow theosophist Margaret Cousins, he called it the “Harm-Onium” in this article. But more significantly, he called it “un-Indian.” Shortly afterward, Lionel Fielden, the Controller of Broadcasting at the time, sent out a circular banning the use of the harmonium as an accompanying or solo instrument in Indian classical music broadcasts." (Matt Rahaim (2011). That Ban(e) of Indian Music: Hearing Politics in The Harmonium. The Journal of Asian Studies, 70, p. 673)

Interesting. I first heard about the ban from a tabla player in the mid 80s and took it at face value. I couldn't remember which instrument.

I see the paper has quotes from Nehru which aren't exactly supportive of the instrument, so I guess that's why most people still associate him with the ban.

It is not, it is just more and more attack on Modi whenever some critical elections are impending. I'd claim that India has never been more democratic. Every side is free to not just talk but shout on top of their lungs, Indian judicial system still works, journalist and media (despite being absolute junk and corrupt) still function on their own. Now, there are incidences here and there, but these are exceptions not the rule and my claim is that by and large India is most democratic country. Given true democratic nature of India, whoever didn't like these exceptions (from either side of political fence), cry foul loudest. Whoever controls media better, appears to be having majority voice.

Indian politics is different than other countries, even within South Asia, I'd say. It was dominated by one single political party (Indian National Congress or INC) headed by a single family. In fact, it is funny that English media blames Modi to be authoritarian, who is duly elected both by people and within his party, compares to INC which is actually autocratic (It's always one Nehru family which is head of party and has first right to be PM if in power). However, since 2014, INC been uprooted with Modi's rise. While INC believed in status-quo approach (hence, no progress of India since 1947 until 2000s and was considered to be extremely corrupt), Modi completely turned political game over. Almost 45% of India voted for Modi's party, BJP in last election (total 800million voters). He has exceptional work ethics, both opponents and supporters admire his integrity and dedication towards serving India (Modi calls himself prime servant instead of prime minister). People on ground can see changes his party has ushered, like transportation infrastructure, digitization, focus on cleanliness and environment and much more. Sure, Modi is also head-strong may be even adamant. But given what India's state was with respect to corruption and rotten state affairs, probably this attitude was needed to bring the change. I'm glad that given mass support he enjoys and adamancy he has, Modi is not the authoritarian, some Indian elites claim to be and uses his power for development of India.

someone's going to learn about Streisand effect

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