Our News Team @ 11 with host Snot Flickerman


Yes, I can hear you, Clem Fandango!

  • 12 Posts
  • 1.19K Comments
Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: October 24th, 2023

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  • The last time I even remember private trackers being taken down was in the days of Oink.UK and What.CD.

    Oink was shut down in 2007 and What was shut down in 2016, both mostly because they had grown so big they were hard to ignore. A lot of modern sites keep an upper limit on the accounts they allow to prevent too much growth and attracting attention.

    Hell, I remember baconBits having an upper limit of less than 10,000 accounts. Once that limit was reached, you couldn’t even send out invites.

    Also, public trackers that were huge like RARBG survived until finances shut them down, via COVID and the war in Ukraine, they were never taken down forcibly, and they were massive and widely used.









  • Just fuckin with ya. Those are all valid gripes. I guess I got in on the scene way early through invites from friends and so I’ve hardly ever had to go through any interview process. I think the only place I “interviewed” was baconbits and it wasn’t really an interview since I mostly just shared evidence of good ratio on other trackers with long-lived accounts. I’ve had an account in good standing on Cinemageddon for… 18 years as of next month. Getting over that initial hump made it pretty easy to get in with good standing, and most decent trackers aren’t that hard to get good ratio on.




  • There isn’t a good winner in this, both outcomes suck, but one slightly less than the other. If Meta wins, it will not trickle down to regular people’s usage of bittorrent being considered fair use, I can guarantee you that. If the copyright holders win, the outcomes still sucks, but at least large corporations will be held to the same standards as regular people instead of having another exception carved out for corporations to be able to do what is considered a crime for regular people.

    There isn’t a movement to change copyright like their used to be. There isn’t a viable North American Pirate Party. Those days are gone, and have been for a long time. I remember the movement and how big it was for a while. We never got mainstream acceptance or appeal and we all started getting old and young people stopped paying attention for the most part.

    Like I said, I’d rather copyright law be changed, but that’s not what will happen here. You don’t get new laws crafted out of court case wins and losses, that’s not how this works, laws are crafted in congress.

    Meta is running all this on the claim that they need this to train their AI, which is all fine and good, but them winning won’t make it so I can make the same claim if I get caught pirating. Why? Because the copyright lawyers will argue reasonably that I didn’t pirate enough data to build an AI and so I can’t be held to the same standard as Meta, who absolutely needed thousands of terabytes of data to train theirs. The scales are totally different and the scale of their operation is part of their argument, that because of the scale of their AI, that there’s no way they could conceivably train it without going broke paying copyright holders. If I am caught pirating a 1/10000th of the same data as they are, the copyright holders will claim, very easily, that I cannot possibly be building the same kind of AI that Meta is building because I would need way more data for that, and that I must be held to account because I must not be actually using it for AI. People like you and me can’t afford a team of high profile lawyers to argue our cases, and so we will lose, precedent simply won’t apply to us.

    Meta winning will just make it so there’s another avenue for corporations to do whatever the fuck they want while people like you and me still have to follow draconian absurd copyright laws. Laws are made in congress, and copyright length can only be changed by bills in congress becoming law. The outcome of this court case is bad either way but it is marginally less bad for people like us to at least have corporations held to the same standard we are.

    EDIT:

    Final note, even if copyright law does get changed in congress, it will be because groups like OpenAI and Meta will lobby the government to change it, and they will not lobby for regular people to get the same rights because they don’t want regular people building their own AIs. Like I said, both outcomes here suck ass, but these giant corporations are not and never will be fighting for people like you and I to have reasonable fair use laws. They will lobby for them to be able to do it, once again, based on their sheer scale, so nobody else can compete or make truly open products in their own home. They want ownership over the process, they won’t send lobbyists in to help regular people, they send lobbyists in to help themselves.

    This applies doubly so to Meta, if you know anything about Zuckerberg or the company, you’d know out of everyone he is ruthless and will do absolutely anything to crush nascent competition.





  • What kind of “better law” do you think will come out of this? That regular people like us will be able to share freely?

    You think that the law being applied on poor people but not on the wealthy is a healthy way to get a better law?

    Get the fuck real and nobody is asking for the copyright cabal to win as much as we are saying “look, if this is the how the law is going to be applied, apply it evenly, don’t just fuck over poor people but give the wealthy a pass.”

    And poor people who don’t have the weight and money of Meta aren’t going to be able to prove that they need the same amount of data to train an LLM so they probably will still have the law held against them. Get fucking real man.

    What country do you think you live in? One where laws are applied evenly or rationally? Or one where fascists have taken over the god damned government? Because guess what it’s the latter and the laws are effectively meaningless for the wealthy but still held against the poor. Sure, if that’s what you want, go for it, but it damn sure won’t suddenly get us better laws or let regular people torrent without worry. Congress has been deadlocked for decades and does nothing but hurt common people and give corporations a ticket to do whatever and you think better laws will come out of this? Seriously, once again, get fucking real.