this post was submitted on 15 Jun 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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⚓ Dedicated to the discussion of digital piracy, including ethical problems and legal advancements.

Rules • Full Version

1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy

2. Don't request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote

3. Don't request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs

4. Don't submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others



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The original /r/piracy was purposefully gimped because Reddit received DMCAs for any random thing and didn't even bother to follow up. Since we're in new waters, I want things to be a bit more relaxed, but there's a limit on how relaxed we can be, without starting to get lawsuits, which I will not be able to fight off. I also host other communities and interests which might cause me headaches.

Remember, this is a hobby project (and none of you scurvy dogs are donating) :D

So here are some piracy-related ground rules for he whole of lemmy.dbzer0.com as of today

  1. No direct links. This means anything which would make Nintendo or Disney light my ass on fire. I am not going to ban you for it (unless you start doing this on purpose), but I will ask admins and mods to remove them.
  2. You can link to websites pages related to piracy. Linking to websites linking to your content (not with a 301 redirect, before you ask) is OK. In general try to keep one degree of separation between our collective groins and your links.
  3. Magnet Links and links to Torrent files are OK, unless we start getting into trouble for it.
  4. /c/piracy has its own, more restrictive rules. Follow them first when they differ from what I post here! /c/piracy is for generic discussion, I don't want it to turn into a link repository full of beggars, got it?
  5. These rules apply to all pirate communities in lemmy.dbzer0.com. Unless that community has more restrictive rules from its own mods. I can easily get a lawsuit because you start making a nintendo ROM link repository.
  6. You can still post direct links elsewhere: If you want a place to post direct links, I suggest you use a community on a server setup to handle this. This requires some significant investment in anonymity and hosting provider (these providers are 3x as expensive, yo!). You can still subscribe and share from those communities with your account in lemmy.dbzer0.com, which can serve as your "port of safety" as those lemmies could be taken down due to those links. If that happens, this safer community will still be up.

All in all, this lemmy is supposed to be Pirate-allied, but not a direct link repository. I literally cannot handle that legal risk at the moment. I hope you all understand the realities of our situation. As much as we can argue that a link to a file is not infringing, the Cartel's legal fund is bottomless, and all I have is a tinsy-tiny treasure chest under my birdbath.

If any pirate communites need to migrate after this, I understand. I would still suggest you keep them around as the "safe" community, and post your link aggregation on a lemmy instance which can handle the eye of sauron. This way you get both a stable community and account, and your links via fediverse. Win-win.

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[–] [email protected] 58 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Wait this is the new home for /r/piracy? Based af.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

And thus the new home for me.

Goodbye reddit I guess 🫡

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Something I've seen is encoding links and sending people to https://www.base64decode.org/. Whether that alleviates legal risk is questionable (unlikely?), but it does prevent scraping for keywords.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Yeah the megalinks community’s new forum does that extensively, seems to keep links alive and untroubled for a long time.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago

Arrrr matey, I code all my pirate maps in base64. I suggest ye do the same, matey. Arrrrrrrggggh 🦜

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

just gave a donation!

How much does it cost to host this instance btw? Hopefully not too much D:

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Thank you! Currently the costs would be close to 40 Eur per month, but I'm using some shared resources so the split is not exact. More than 30 Eur for sure.

[–] [email protected] 25 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Rules that make sense. And I just donated a few days of server use. Ain't much but it's honest piracy.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I appreciate if matey

[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How about we post direct links to reddit and link the reddit post here lol?

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Haha mad lad and archive it in the process and post the archive.org link. But, no probably not to be safest.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago
[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I remember not too long ago (before the discord server went kaput, for other reasons) Sin Eater's Cove discord server posted all links encrypted, and they had a cool bot that could message you the decoded link privately.

Maybe a future bot here could do the same.

But for now posting the encrypted links would be good, just as an extra layer of protection.

I think it's a healthy standard practice to implement when sailing high seas.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

This gives me an idea. Make a federated torrent site. It would be practically impossible to take down and one instance going offline because they don't have money wouldn't destroy everything like in RARBG's case.

[–] [email protected] 19 points 1 year ago

not going to work due to trust/validation issues.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago

Was thinking the same - this looks like a prime usecase for IPFS, honestly.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

This requires some significant investment in anonymity and hosting provider (these providers are 3x as expensive, yo!).

What is meant by these? Any links, I mean, pointers?

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (1 children)

I heard njal.la experienced a social engineering attack on tucows to steal some of their domains at some point. But other than that, is there really any DNS registration that cannot be lost if enough powerful people demand it?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago

I heard njal.la experienced a social engineering attack on tucows to steal some of their domains at some point.

Oh, I did not know that was the reason. IMHO it is better to know it was not because of malice.

is there really any DNS registration that cannot be lost if enough powerful people demand it?

The answer is no. I was just trying to give a heads up, because a friend of mine just warned me of it, and I remembered I learned about njal.la here.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

Fully agree. Tbh I'd have no problem even if you said no magnet or torrent links. It's good to have places for discussion, there are other places to actually go and find those things. Thanks for all the work setting this up hoping it takes off!

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago (1 children)

How do you feel about some advertising? I have some rare lost games (as in the torrents are dead/non existent). Would it be ok if I shared magnets to them at some point?

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

Ye that's fine.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Absolute newbie. What's c/piracy?

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The community where you are right now

[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago

It might be better to refer to it by its full name ([email protected]) so it doesn't get confusing for new users, since alot of us are seeing this from other instances, some of which have their own /c/piracy.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Reasonable rules really, lets hope we just fly under the radar.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I suggest to post any links here encoded in base64 (see 64decode.org/) It’s easy encryption/decryption.

That way the DMCA crawlers can’t get to it. That is how some forums operate, and I love the idea.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

Yes but it might be only a batter of time until they catch up. Keep to the main rule about no direct links even under b64. I am too poor for lawyers yo

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

It's not encryption. Or rather, it's about as much encryption as ROT-13.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago