Reddit's /r/Piracy is deleting almost ten years of history to avoid ban

https://torrentfreak.com/reddits-r-piracy-deleting-almost-10-years-of-history-to-avoid-ban-190407/

by okket • 7 years ago

163 126 7 years ago

mindslight2• 7 years ago

This is a small price to pay for the censorship that has successfully defeated the scourges of white nationalism, bigotry, and general ignorance.

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.

anonymouswacker• 7 years ago

It's just a victim of the times we live in. Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter, simply grew too much outside of its original intention. It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests, but these interests started to spread into the dark elements of hate speech, child pornography, etc. When profitability comes into question, as any company wants to strive for, it has to appease.

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.

mindslight2• 7 years ago

The four horsemen have always been on reddit, hence my reference to the AACS key.

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.

devoply• 7 years ago

ah yes 4chan lite was supposed to turn out completely differently.

mxfh• 7 years ago

"Reddit, like Facebook, YouTube, and Twitter," ... "It was a place to form anonymous communities around niche interests"

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.

yreg• 7 years ago

or it has to find a revenue stream outside of pursuing advertising revenue

hey what do we pay gold for then :(

panarky4• 7 years ago

Stop signs and police citations are a small price to pay for the traffic control that has eliminated fatal road accidents.

Oh, traffic control hasn't actually eliminated every fatality? Then why the fuck are we tolerating stop signs and police citations?

Asooka• 7 years ago

Good. Piracy must be eradicated if culture is to survive.

rhn_mk1• 7 years ago

Huh? Piracy: permissionless copying, extending, including, remixing, transforming, retelling, inspiring; is culture.

CableGorilla• 7 years ago

Only a Sith deals in absolutes.

tomohawk• 7 years ago

Since this statement is an absolute truth claim, perhaps the one making it is a sith?

Maken• 7 years ago

This comment will eventually cause the deletion of this entire thread. Congratulations.

s_dev• 7 years ago

Piracy: the unauthorized use or reproduction of another's work.

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.

scoot_718• 7 years ago

whywhywhywhy• 7 years ago

People passionate about something are much more responsible than actual legal rights holders.

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.

0815test2• 7 years ago

Rights holders only do the absolute minimum to preserve the culture they own ...

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.

germinalphrase• 7 years ago

Is there a keyword for that kind of version improvement?

ionised• 7 years ago

We had culture before copyright, we'll have culture after copyright.

All that needs to be eradicated is the obsolete middle-men acting as gatekeepers to our shared culture for profit.

pennaMan2• 7 years ago

The middle-men are the most desperate about tyrannical copyright laws. The content creators don't need IP to survive and create, because they can always monetize their content in some form. But for the middle-men it's their only means of income.

rlue2• 7 years ago

Culture != commerce. The very fact that piracy is sustained by volunteer communities should speak for itself here, but if you need more evidence, consider:

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...

Freak_NL2• 7 years ago

Piracy may well be a requirement for culture to survive beyond that which is mandated and approved by the major content owners.

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.

Youden• 7 years ago

Not arguing that there's no loss but Redacted, What.cd's successor, is currently at 840k releases and 725k artists. As far as pure numbers are concerned that's a decent recovery.

CuriousCosmic• 7 years ago

This is a rather strange take considering how large and quality the cultural (music, movies, tv, games, books, art, etc) communities are in the pirating scene.

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.

johnchristopher2• 7 years ago

This is a rather strange take considering how large and quality the cultural (music, movies, tv, games, books, art, etc) communities are in the pirating scene.
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.

fit2rule• 7 years ago

All culture is a lie and persists only in the telling. If we don't copy those movies, they don't really live on ..

pennaMan2• 7 years ago

Without piracy, "culture" is exactly what the IP overlords say it is, nothing more noting less. Do you want to live in that world?

kriro• 7 years ago

Humans learn by copying and adapting. Pretty awesome culture we'd have if artists and musicians of days past would have to jump through DMCA-hoops.

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.

Avamander• 7 years ago

You're so short-sighted it's amazing. We've seen numerous times how things lacking copies are lost to time, Doctor Who is probably the most prominent example, had people pirated it, we might still have something that has a big cultural value.

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.

klntsky5• 7 years ago

/r/Piracy owners deserve it. They should've considered such a possibility before allowing their community to grow on a platform they do not control.

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.

laurent123456• 7 years ago

On the other hand, it's thanks to communities like this one and others that Reddit got where it is today. So not unreasonable to blame them when they change their mind in the name of Ads.

klntsky5• 7 years ago

Nope. These communities' owners and participants were basically just doing free work by producing content. But they didn't sign a contract or anything.

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.

emilfihlman• 7 years ago

Linking to content is not piracy.

dvdkon2• 7 years ago

/r/piracy had a strict policy of not linking to pirate content, even. They really tried to stay on Reddit's good side.

dvdkon2• 7 years ago

I could create a site promising to host all files forever and after years of operation delete everything. It would certainly be within my rights, but you'd have every reason to hate me. Having a legal right to do something doesn't mean it is a good (and compassionate) idea.

morganvachon• 7 years ago

I don't go on /r/Piracy, but from my understanding there were already rules in place, and heavily enforced, about not linking to infringing content, and it was supposed to be just a place to discuss piracy. How is simple discussion of a topic infringing at all? How did they deserve this purge?

It's exactly this attitude that has a chilling effect on all speech, no matter the subject. You should be ashamed.

klntsky5• 7 years ago

It's exactly this attitude that has a chilling effect on all speech, no matter the subject.

No, it isn't. The lack of precaution and inability to decently set up a forum software is.

rlue2• 7 years ago

There's a difference between being right and being constructive, and you should consider this difference when submitting public commentary on sensitive topics (or just any time you open your mouth). In a purely self-interested sense, being right but abrasive is a poor strategy because it induces people to focus on the faults in your argument, rather than the merits.

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.

schrectacular• 7 years ago

It seems like rights holders have realized that carpet bombing is a cheap and "effective" strategy. There are reports (https://youtu.be/JwG0bQ7WC3c) of music copyright holders reporting the use of even a single chord in YouTube videos. This strategy appears to be having a chilling effect across multiple platforms.

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.

Tsubasachan• 7 years ago

One of my favourite torrent sites decided to go private because of DMCA takedown requests. That probably wouldn't work for Reddit. But it just illustrates that the pirate ship will keep on sailing even if you can't see it.

Wowfunhappy• 7 years ago

If you can't see it, it will also be harder for casual pirates to find. It's basically impossible to stop piracy, but it can be made more difficult, and that could have a significant impact.

Traster2• 7 years ago

This seems like a direct knock on effect of the ridiculous asymmetry in legal liability. Due to the draconian way the DMCA works all the content platforms have their own informal process. The informal process involves no liability for a false claim so as a result you get this mass claiming.

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.

debacle• 7 years ago

The DMCA is not draconian, and in fact is a pretty even handed law. Its implementation by the various platforms is what's draconian - a mostly automated system that defers to rights holders without any sort of real appeals process.

zamadatix• 7 years ago

The DMCA was passed in 1998, how is a company established in 2005 responsible for the law being draconian? Not even Napster was around in time to influence the DMCA.

klntsky5• 7 years ago

Good. The more damage copyright holders do to the public, the more people understand why the idea of owning ideas is stupid.

mikekchar• 7 years ago

This is a common misunderstanding. Copyright does not allow you to own an idea -- there is nothing in the law to allow that. Instead it gives you a right to copy something. Specifically, it gives you an exclusive right. When people talk about "intellectual property" the are referring to owning rights with respect to some intellectual concept, not owning the intellectual concept itself. The very common confusion that you seem to suffer from is the reason why the FSF has previously recommended that people don't use the term "intellectual property" -- because it is very misleading.

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.

black_puppydog5• 7 years ago

After the new EU copyright directive passed parliament, I went on a bit of a hunt for reasons. Outside Germany, we simply didn't get traction for protest. And one reason people gave was "it won't be enforcable anyhow".

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.

gumby• 7 years ago

And one reason people gave was "it won't be enforcable anyhow".

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.

Mirioron5• 7 years ago

In Estonia there was barely any talk about article 13. When it passed it was a 3 sentence article in the national newspaper. We had some follow up later, but it was mostly a politician saying that everything's fine.

People are unaware.

tsehd• 7 years ago

There seriously should be a law against such "carpet bombing".

SiempreViernes3• 7 years ago

The hated copyright directive contains provisions that require the creation of mechanism for challenging wrongful take downs, which if implemented properly would resolve the issue.

jakobdabo• 7 years ago

Why do YouTube and others allow mass reporting at scale? They should use a CAPTCHA for each reported URL to ensure that the reports are being sent by humans.

Mirioron5• 7 years ago

They would probably be held liable under DMCA if they did that.

tzs• 7 years ago

Copyright claims are super easy to make at scale, but the platforms themselves cannot investigate at scale, meaning the small guy suffers.

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.

Mirioron5• 7 years ago

Even if they go back up again it still requires a lot of effort to counter notice it, because it requires a human to do so. The claim is lobbed by an algorithm though.

There need to be severe consequences for claiming everything.

dspillett• 7 years ago

If people want the data after this purge is complete, it might be available in resoruces such as those linked from https://www.reddit.com/r/datasets/comments/6lqbsd/downloadin...

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.

supernes• 7 years ago

Can't wait until reddit decides to ban porn as advertiser-unfriendly, à la tumblr. They're heading steadfast in the direction of sanitizing the site until it's nothing but gifs of puppies yawning.

Bayart• 7 years ago

There's something heartwarming about 4chan remaining committed to being absolute cancer.

devmop• 7 years ago

Even they've gone down that route. 4chan's been split into two domains with the NSFW boards on the original and the SFW boards (or as safe as 4chan ever gets) on the other.

wsgeorge• 7 years ago

4chan, despite all its vileness, has convinced me of the necessity to maintain as much unrestrained human freedom in (at least) some quarters of the Internet as is possible.

Such freedom seems so essential to Internet culture that, in my opinion, it must be protected.

bliblah• 7 years ago

Unfortunately the design is very much dated and some of the boards are too (Why does /vp/ need to exist when users can easily migrate to /vg/)

m-p-32• 7 years ago

I have an IPFS archive available here, feel free to pin it to your node.

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmRHpZXaUJS5Mc4P2xG6yLckHKsY88BASLLWz7Q...

Majestic121• 7 years ago

It seems that links all point to the original website, not an IPFS copy.

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 ?

m-p-32• 7 years ago

The goal of the archive was to keep anything from inside reddit (submission links, comments) available with the smallest footprint possible. (compressed 80MB, decompressed 1.2GB)

I guess you could run the archive tool with some extra parameters to grab external content, but it will substantially increase the archive size.

Mediterraneo10• 7 years ago

How is Reddit’s crackdown on piracy-mentioning posts going to affect r/Scholar? That’s a subreddit where the guidelines clearly point people to Sci-Hub and Libgen, and if the desired content is not there, people are encouraged to supply that content to those who request it. r/Scholar is very popular in the academic world, especially in countries like India where institutions often lack subscriptions to publication-hosting databases, and I can imagine great disappointment if that subreddit were shut down.

rahuldottech• 7 years ago

Dunno man, but I hope it survives. Even if it is banned, maybe it'll pop up as a different community elsewhere?

Aromasin2• 7 years ago

My Reddit time has dropped to almost 0 with the mass adoption of Discord. Lots of valuable Google Sheets full of resources are pinned in the most niche of Discord servers. It's not an effective swap in many cases, but it's advantages are currently vastly outweighing the disadvantages.

rel2thr• 7 years ago

I’m surprised reddit let’s the sports stream subreddits stay up.

These are kind of going mainstream and must be a huge thorn in the side of cable companies

save_ferris• 7 years ago

They started cracking down on the soccer stream subs a few months ago, but I'm not sure why they haven't followed suit on the American sports streams.

alexcason• 7 years ago

RIP r/soccerstreams

lightbyte• 7 years ago

That massive ban-wave was pushed by entities such as Sky who don't have an interest in American sports streams

oligopoly• 7 years ago

Yeah, and people just moved elsewhere. All it's going to do is hurt Reddit's bottom line. Let me guess porn is next? Digg is looming

rhino369• 7 years ago

My only guess is that the NFL, NBA, etc. don’t really care. The viewers are still watching the ads.

black_puppydog5• 7 years ago

Some of r/Piracy seems to be willing to play with more p2p solutions. If you're willing to sacrifice archival properties (like the last ten years woth of stuff...) then even an IRC channel might do. Some people are playing with scuttlebutt/ssb, and frankly I don't see why that wouldn't be a good fit, assuming you handle your feed with a bit of care if you want to stay anonymous.

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.

kyriakos2• 7 years ago

Not just about piracy but..

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.

lallysingh• 7 years ago

It's a natural movement of power between older and newer generations. As power transfers, the recipients change strategies from attack to defend.

black_puppydog5• 7 years ago

that makes it sound far more inevitable than it really is.

SiempreViernes3• 7 years ago

I'd argue that this is mostly restricted to for profit discussion platforms that only considers monthly users and are otherwise uninterested in community and topic issues.

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.

kyriakos2• 7 years ago

usually platforms that allow controversial topics to be discussed also happen to be the ones which grow faster. at some point, even hosting becomes a problem requirement some revenue streams. i am not blaming reddit or any other platform i am just stating that this cycle has existed for a long time and is predictable.

hi5eyes• 7 years ago

eternal september forever

notthemessiah2• 7 years ago

I don't know, it seems like platforms have learned to adapt without causing mass emigration. Basically, their shittiness to their userbase has to be gradual at a rate that they gain new users faster than they lose old ones.

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).

pas• 7 years ago

Was Reddit preaching against copyrights? Or even against "corporate selloutism"?

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.

dpark• 7 years ago

The best thing that ever happened to Reddit from a growth perspective was Digg blocking DeCSS keys. Digg flipped out trying to block it because it violated the DMCA and as a result a huge set of users fled to Reddit which notably did not block the same keys from being posted at the time.

Edit: Looks like it was the AACS key (Blu-Ray and HD-DVD) was the key that set all this off, not CSS.

Pizzaputer• 7 years ago

At some point, I think content-hosts should counter-sue for time and customers/clients/users lost for erroneous copyright filings. Then the internet can just become one great big lawsuit that happens to have computers attached to it.

systematical• 7 years ago

Funny yet /r/NHLStreams persists. The internet is a funny place.

dwild• 7 years ago

It's all up to the copyright holder. Some are more active looking over their copyrights, some just care less.

IloveHN84• 7 years ago

I hope people from internet archive is storing everything.

Until no alternative to unique source of streaming with a single account shows up, I 'm not going to pay for every streaming service

Xelbair• 7 years ago

I wonder why regulations target content sharing platforms, not the content itself. or the ads companies.

Reddit's /r/Piracy is deleting almost ten years of history to avoid ban

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