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Comment by charcircuit | Hacker News Reader

Linking to piracy sites whose content is all blatantly stolen from artists does seem violating to me.

That seems like an argument to go after the actual alleged illegally hosted materials through the proper DMCA takedown request.

Both should be done. Often the actual illegally hosted materials are on servers not friendly with takedown requests or will get immediately reloaded by the pirates. By going after the links it can cut off the ability for people to find the illegally hosted materials.

Seems like a strange way to attempt to police the internet by proxy. The Internet should ignore or route around people attempting to police how nodes connect to each other.

I agree that the larger Internet should be capable of routing lawful traffic through jurisdictions where such traffic is lawful to another jurisdiction where the traffic is lawful. But within a country for example local laws should be applied to the traffic.

There are two options here:

1) You can have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, but then anyone can route around censorship because you don't know if they're discussing geopolitics or distributing DeCSS.

2) You can't have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, which is >99% of all connections because even different cities have different laws, which is an Orwellian panopticon and the destruction of all privacy.

I'm going to have to insist we stick with the first one.

I am fine with encryption, but there should be a legal process that can stop the violation of laws such as by disconnecting nodes that violate laws or preventing linking to nodes that violate laws.

I think you're missing the concept here that laws change as a packet travels from one switch to another, not to mention what happens after they go under the ocean.

Are you prepared to be held accountable for breaking the laws of repressed countries that sentence people to death for leaving a religion or insulting authority?

I assume not, but then it's an arbitrary game of whos laws and when. The only logical continuation would be if we had a standard of law worldwide, but that's a separate problem in itself and not anywhere near reality today.

Suppose there is a shared server outside your jurisdiction which is hosting a wide variety of content none of which is a violation of the law in their jurisdiction, but 2% of the content is a violation of the law in your jurisdiction. Or isn't hosting any content at all but also isn't a jurisdiction that does the same censorship as yours and then people can use the connection as a VPN.

If people in your jurisdiction can make a secure connection to it, e.g. to get the 98% of the content they have which is lawful in your jurisdiction, then they can also get the content you were trying to ban because you can't tell which one they're doing. Preventing this is all or nothing: Either they can connect to the server that isn't subject to your laws, or they can't. And the latter is heinous and tyrannical.

Is this like how in France, DNS resolvers are legally required to block certain websites? That's right, if you run "unbound" with default options in France you're a felon.

Yeah. The government can dictate what you are and aren't allowed to do. This is not a novel concept.

Which is heartbreaking (and I'd argue misleading too), but not the whole story.

You can only issue takedowns in relation with material that you have copyright over. At least one of these sites I know for a fact routinely scrubs FAKKU licensed content, and abides by takedown requests.

what piracy sites is gallery-dl linking to?

I do not want to promote them here, but if you read the linked github thread you will see the names of what extractors were deleted.

Through the DCMA lens, does a tool having the ability to download from example.com = linking to example.com?

In this case the files you could view on github literally had links directly to copyrighted works. It was not just that it was compatible with pirate sites.

Where? I looked at a copy from March 16, and I only saw placeholders like 12345 and 12345/67890abcde in the files mentioned in the issue

Look in the test vectors and you will see ones that are not for generic ids.

Wait a second... By the view you're espousing right now, doesn't that make this conversation "illegal"? Why aren't we filing DMCA takedowns to HN because the list of the naughty sites is at the top of the page for this very thread?

This seems like turtles all the way down.

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