And this is why you can't trust corporations. They won't stand up for you, or give you any chance at all, if another corporation wants to see scorched earth. The DMCA, ya'll.
this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2024
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Fucking discord. They tried to speedrun a walled garden and have had some moderate success, but does anyone trust them at this point?
Do people using discord now think they’re going to still be using it 3 years from now? 2?
Yes. They get squeezed again and again and keep falling for the same grift.
And another reason not to use Discord.
The cat has won today, I wonder what the mouse will do tomorrow
Use Ryujinx.
Weird name for a mouse but will do
Well, the next best option would be paying for hosting in a 3rd world country who doesn't give a shit about international copyright laws. Not an easy task, but hosting your own Discord like platform is probably the absolute best you can do if you're running an operation like making an emulator while the copyright bandits cry foul.
Sure, hosting your own platform or using a decentralized solution would prevent this bullshit, but the whole situation is worse than just them deleting it. The whole issue is that no Discord terms of service were violated here. So they went against their own terms with this move, which means anyone is subject to the same actions even if they are complying with the terms of service.
The whole issue is that no Discord terms of service were violated here.
Really? I'm not a lawyer, but...
TOS:
We reserve the right to block, remove, and/or permanently delete your content if it is in breach of these terms, our Community Guidelines, our other policies, or any applicable law or regulation, or if it creates risk for Discord or negatively impacts the experience or interests of other Discord users to continue to make it available.
Community guidelines:
24. Do not share content that violates anyone's intellectual property or other rights. This includes sharing or selling game cheats or hacks. (See our Unauthorized Copyright Access Policy for more.)
For more information on how Discord handles copyright complaints, please view our Copyright & Intellectual Property Policy.
Given that there's a court order stating these tools violated Nintendo's intellectual property rights, not sure how you can draw the conclusion that this is somehow not a violation of the TOS
They didn't share the content in Discord. It's a huge distinction.
If we were to interpret this the way it was applied in this case, pretty much all servers would have to be removed. You shared an image you don't own the copyright to, server nuked. You shared the video you don't own the copyright to, server nuked. You shared the link to some tool that allows you to download a video you down have a copyright to, server nuked.
And there isn't a court order "stating these tools violated Nintendo's intellectual property rights" since the case was settled outside of court.
The only one I can see that could be applied to the situation is "risk for discord" if Nintendo threatened them with a lawsuit.
Under which grounds? For a threat to work, it has to have some merits.
They could threaten to sue discord for hosting copyrighted content, even if they expect to lose it doesn't matter, the goal is to make discord close the channel and it worked.
Cost/benefit analysis, you'll probably win the lawsuit, it will still cost you a shit load of money in the meantime and you're fighting against a company that has enough money to stop all its activities for a decade and still come out with enough funds to resume activities as if nothing happened. Or you can just ban one community from your platform.
Right, if they host it, but they don't. That's the difference between what happened with GitHub/GitLab.
And they can't sue without the case having any merits. Meritless lawsuits also legally known as frivolous lawsuits are thrown out before even discovery phase with attorney fees awarded and the moron lawyers getting sanctioned.
Hosting isn't necessary, providing access is enough, otherwise The Pirate Bay wouldn't have had to change location again and again.
Hosting is required under DMCA.
Edit: Misread the part about The Pirate Bay.
Previous comment
And The Pirate Bay was banned and blocked hundreds of times, they have many proxy sites for that reason.
And the fact that they didn't host the content didn't keep them from being raided and from seeing their servers being seized.
Indeed, and they made them heroes, not villains. The Police Bay was a nice touch.
And DMCA wasn't used as justification for the raid. US wasn't even directly involved. It was explicitly mentioned that US law only applies to the US territory. You are grappling at straws to prove your point that is just false by any factual reading.
If that were the case, Lemmy would be illegal, since it allows you or me or anyone else to upload any image we don't own the copyright to.
They could threaten to sue for facilitating copyright infringement by letting the community do the thing they were just sued (and settled) for.
Once you involve the legal department they'll often tell you it's not worth fighting because although you might win because you're doing nothing wrong, you might need to fight for long enough that the cost won't be worth the effort, see Bleem vs Sony, Bleem won, it went bankrupt regardless.
If you think Discord wants to bother fighting against Nintendo's lawyers, that will find all kinds of technicalities to keep things going, just to protect a community that's pretty meaningless in the grand scheme of things, while they're considering doing an IPO, then you're pretty naive.
Well yeah. Terms of service don't exist for the benefit of the users. If the company doesn't like what you are doing, nothing stops them from banning you, there's no reason to expect them to try to be fair about it. This is why these sites/apps having a dominant position is such a problem.
Terms of service is actually a two party agreement. It's very weak on the consumer side due to capitalism, but it's technically enforceable. Hence, all the class action lawsuits happens when company side breaks that agreement. They need to show that you broke terms of service to justify a ban. Prior to both sides agreeing, they can refuse to allow you to use the service for any reason. People seems to conflate these two things.
If companies terms of service said "we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don't have to promise any service, and you have no rights" nobody would sign those terms.
If companies terms of service said "we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don't have to promise any service, and you have no rights" nobody would sign those terms.
Nobody who took the time to read the terms of service, and who felt that there was a real risk of those terrible terms being invoked, and who felt they had a viable alternative. But for the other 99.9% of people, they will just hit agree and move on.
Maybe until they got screwed once, and then they would. It would also be illegal in most countries, since there are laws (weak they might be) that guarantee some things.
I don't buy it. If you have examples of someone successfully suing to be unbanned because the ban was beyond the terms of service I'll be convinced but I don't think that's ever happened or would ever happen because I don't think terms of service waive any rights to deny access to servers the company owns, especially when it's free to begin with.
From the article:
At the end of the day, platforms like Discord have no obligation to host anything they don’t want to host, as we discussed back when GitLab did something similar by deplatforming Suyu’s code.
“Their first email was that my account has broken the TOS, with no additional information.” He claims Sudachi wasn’t doing anything infringing. Later, he was told it vaguely had something to do with intellectual property but says Discord still hasn’t given him any details.
The bans I've gotten myself are always like this when it's a big company. No real explanation given, no recourse possible, I don't expect a lawyer would tell me differently. IMO the only solution is to stop focusing on the "rules" they have written entirely for their own benefit and start using systems that are more decentralized in terms of who is actually in control.
So they went against their own terms with this move, which means anyone is subject to the same actions even if they are complying with the terms of service.
Sure, but if you were comfortable with Discord as a home for this work, people have been speaking up against discord as a resource for these kinds of things pretty much since the beginning of discord.
Its a lesson learned, but better off now that later. No corporation can be trusted. You have that knowledge now if you didn't before. Make decisions accordingly.
People were not comfortable about it until 2021 when they relaxed their terms of service. Heck, Discord even approved them as community servers that have stricter rules.
It's a clear move that they are done with Discord being a chat platform and ready for their IPO.