Also, _come on_; if someone gives up after one search term, which also includes advanced site-restricting syntax, there's no way they'd be able to operate youtube-dl anyway: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtube-dl&ia=web
Yeah idk why someone would type in the full URL of a site and not just the term they're looking for in a search engine...what a dumb way to test that on their part.
The point isn't that you can't reach the website by typing in the search term, the point is that they've deindexed the site. If you search for youtube-dl, neither youtube-dl.org nor yt-dl.org come up in the results, as far as I can see.
You can still access it from the results via other sites, like github and wikipedia (which even makes the real website pop up in the info square, funnily enough), but the search results themselves do not contain any links to the main website.
The article doesn't explain it well, but if you search for just `youtube-dl` (without the "site" prefix), the main youtube-dl.org site is still not present in the search results.
Not for actual search IIRC. Last time I checked, they only used their own index and crawlers for the "smart search" and instant answers. Almost all of their search results are still sourced from Bing.
That's pretty easy to check for yourself, usually whenever something does not show up on Bing it won't on DDG either. A good example of that was when the "tank man" picture disappeared from Bing and the exact same thing happened on DDG.
I'm just waiting for the day they announce an NFT or a "trusted partners" program with establishment media entities. Come on, DDG, you've come this far, so truly jump the shark for our amusement.
Google pushed the envelope on how silly the name for a major company can be, but DuckDuckGo is unlikely to ever hit mass market success with that name. (Or, more importantly, the current implementation.)
I agree that was not a high quality post from TorrenFreak. I do however also find the blogspam label to be unfair. TF has pushed some important agendas over the years.
Someone should make a search engine that only indexes sites that Google and DuckDuckgo do not index. It would serve sort of the same purpose as like, lists of banned books.
You want a list of spam sites, phishing, malware, and SEO-driven gibberish with back-links?
Yeah, I guess that would probably be useful for something. Academic research into just how awful people are, perhaps. And, of course, as a blackhole list.
Just make sure you get a bulk discount on disk space. Such a list would be huge.
"You want a list of spam sites, phishing, malware, and SEO-driven gibberish with back-links?"
Yes, exactly, I want exactly whatever I search for, including that if that's what I search for.
If I search for something which exists, then I want the knowledge of that existence. The value judgement is no one else's business unless I search for "X but only where approved by any governments or companies with any political or financial interest in controlling what I know."
When it turns out that I would never choose to search for that, that is the proof that it's wrong to be doing it.
You don't really get the knowledge of its existence if it's one of thirty million hits. A search engine that includes everything is a kind of Library of Babel. The info is there but it doesn't help you.
There is no reason for legitimate filtering not to be voluntary, like the default porn filter that you have the option to disable.
I still have access to my spam folder, and unsolicited communication is not the same as search results. If I search for something, then I searched for it. I am THE ONLY person who may judge the value of the results.
The search engine's job is only to tell me what's there, not to tell me what I want.
You can't say that for anyone else. No one can say that for anyone else.
And, repeating, unsolicited communication is different from search results.
But in fact yes I do wish I could trust that my spam folder was actually complete. I find false positives in there all the time. But my point was that even if it's incomplete, you still have a spam folder that you can choose whether to look at or not. The fact that some stuff is filtered by other parties before reaching my client or server is irrelevant.
I do want to see those emails. Which is why I run my own mail server where I control what does and does not get rejected. BTW Google and Microsoft do reject or worse, silently drop tons of legitimate mail for such great reasons as the sending server having a bad actor living on the block some time in the past. Mail filtering is a really bad argument why you wouldn't want to see what is hidden from you by the incumbent providers.
Running my own crawler is unfortunately not as realistic.
And you are welcome to it. But don't be surprised that few other people also desire that service, or that no companies are rushing to provide it for you.
Banned books are too dangerous for being find publicly, and list of banned books is too useless thing. Better to create a hidden torrent tracker for things nobody else wants to host.
This is the same line of thinking as "someone should set up an alternate social network where users don't get banned". Except that 99.9% of bans at Facebook, Twitter and the like are completely justified, and so that's what the dominant content on your new platform will be.
> Except that 99.9% of bans at Facebook, Twitter and the like are completely justified
Gonna need a big citation on that. One of my Facebook accounts got banned because I accidentally left my VPN on. Whilst I take responsibility for the terrible opsec, the fact is people get banned all the time for doing things that are anti-Facebook rather than anti-social (anti each other). I would definitely use a social network that doesn’t feel like a police state.
We aren't talking of 99.9% of Facebook users, we are talking about 99.9% of banned Facebook users - and a VPN is just one thing that can get a non-malicious user banned.
Who really needs a search engine nowadays? The google or ddg or whatever is just a search aggregator for making no need to open Wikipedia for searching who is Franko then open weather.com for figuring out the weather next weekend then open SO for quitting vim and so on. I can not remember when I really searched something general last time which is impossible to find via single-site search. And of course free porn videos and other pirated stuff and cool-hacker-utils is never been searched using government-friendly search businesses.
It's cool that you've had enough experience to just know where everything that you need is. Not everybody has the same experience with finding things on the internet as you, nor is the average internet user anywhere near as technically-minded as you.
6B showings of ad-loaded webpage does not mean 6B successful results shown. And my claim is that most of successful google searches is just a wrong choice of a search engine.
And public domain content, and content licensed for free distribution, and abandoned software. The good stuff is there too, but the legit free stuff isn't all bad.
I suspect this is largely due to DDG using Bing under the hood, which has led to similar weirdness in the past, eg all major porn sites disappearing from the results in Singapore (while Google still showed them, mind you!).
Still super disappointing though, and yet another reason why trying to build a better search engine on top of someone else's tech is a non-starter.
Having worked on Google's indexing system, I can't imagine how much it would cost to write all of the crawling and indexing code from scratch, and then run it on over the visible web. You need to bootstrap somehow form an existing index if you want to get anywhere in any reasonable time.
If there's a market for alternative search engines out there, AWS is already serving so much of the web that Amazon should really provide crawling and basic indexing (for a fee, of course) so it's done once for everyone, with Amazon Lambda processing to allow search engines to customize their indexing. I'm not sure if it would make them much money, but it makes more sense to start up a search engine on AWS using Amazon's crawl and basic indexing vs. using a search engine competitor's crawl and indexing.
That's an insanely good idea. Since behind the scenes, Amazon would know who owns each website that it's crawling, an AWS search database would inherently be better-curated and more trustworthy than anything an external crawler could put together. Having your website on AWS would be crucial for SEO.
Google and Bing can already crawl AWS sites just fine. As long as Amazon doesn't provide any first-party search engine, just providing search engine infrastructure, I think it would be a net win for competition.
As it stands, if you want to bootstrap your own search engine, you need to base your search engine on either Google or Bing's index, or perform the herculean task of making your own crawler+indexer+search engine. If Amazon can commoditize the back end, and let AWS-hosted search engines provide differentiators late in the indexing pipeline and on the search/serving side, I think we'd see more niche search engines spring up.
Yes, A9 was one of the competitors for some of my time at Google, but I'm talking about Amazon basically creating some search engine infrastructure and a framework for building search engines on top of. Selling shovels to the gold miners, in a sense.
The crawling and initial indexing stages need a lot of scaling and performance tuning work, which is a core competency for the AWS engineers. Furthermore, essentially zero people say "I want to build a startup around my new crawl scheduling idea, but it's too time consuming and expensive to write the rest of the search engine." Many more people say "I have a new idea for ranking" or "I have a new idea for content extraction, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to write the rest of a search engine".
Google and Bing already expose "custom search engines" which are basically just filters on top of their search engines. I'm talking about something similar, but much deeper customization.
Also, I was at Goldman when Google Search Appliance was EoL'd. GS had plenty of internal content that needed to be indexed, absolutely needed to be kept private, and wasn't well indexed by any of the replacements GS evaluated. For companies that keep lots of documents in AWS storage, it would be good to open up the space for Google Search Appliance replacements. Amazon could write their own, but given that Google abandoned the space, the profit margins aren't great for a huge company. However, creating a search ecosystem within the AWS ecosystem makes the AWS ecosystem more attractive. Maybe forgoing the search profits and inviting in search providers would be a net win in selling more AWS compute and storage.
I don't see how it's a non-starter. DDG is still a better search engine than bing, if for no other reason than bangs. If a censored search engine is the non-starter then every well-known search engine is a non-starter.
Maybe that's the real problem. There have been some recent articles on HN about how "search is broken" and maybe this article falls under that. Because what really gets me is that there is plenty of legit content on "pirate sites" and blocking them completely cuts off that content.
I've been using Kagi (https://kagi.com) for a few months and it's been great. It's free while in beta but will be funded by subscription fees afterward.
The killer feature for me is the ability to up-rank and down-rank sites in my personal results, which has been really helpful for curating my tech-related searches. It allows me to quickly find high-quality docs and eliminate the garbage.
I’ve been using Kagi as my primary browser for a while. My only complaint about so far has nothing to do with Kagi itself, I just wish I could set it as my primary search engine in Safari.
I've set it as my primary search engine in Firefox, it looks like there are instructions here about how to do the same in safari: https://kagi.com/faq#default
The YouTube-DL website notably does not come up in those search results, it's their GitHub page that does. The website does appear in the sidebar, because it pulls the sidebar data from Wikipedia, and YouTube-DL's Wikipedia page does come up.
Interesting, mine are github, videohelp.com, and then ottverse.
I imagine that adds credence to the theory that it's because of Bing's index removing them - maybe they use a different index in India?
Not sure what you mean. Someone on urban dictionary defines blogspam as
> A blog where the author paraphrases or copies from the original article/webpage in an attempt to increase his or her own traffic.
Another person as
> loaded with so much foreign material, it refuses to function properly
Since neither of those fit, I guess you mean it more like a random blog that thw owners 'spam' everywhere such as onto link collectors like HN?
Torrentfreak is quite the opposite of that, if that's what you were accusing them of in the first place. One could say that your comment's "headline is outright false"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TorrentFreak
Yandex has an agreement with copyright holders and removes sites with pirated content from results. But those are Russian copyright holders and they mostly care about content in Russian.
Also Yandex removes sites that are banned in Russia, for example BBC in Russian or Navalny's site.
I used to be able to find MP3s with Google, until one day it simply stopped working. Then I moved to Baidu, which worked for a while. I now use DDG to find movies, and yet looks like the curtain may be closing on that one too.
I fear it might only be a matter of time before Yandex stops working too.
why would you look for torrents in search engine? you will anyway find most of them dead
you are much better off with Knaben on EU domain, same results can be achieved with add-ons in qbit, then there are special software not worth my time (Jackett)
but I agree I find myself using yandex much more nowadays as alternative
Serious Question: How is the DDG search structured? Is it a cosmetic skin over Bing, or is it aggregating from other sites like Yahoo, ecosia etc additionally?
If it is just Bing under the hood, how does it exist as business entity. I am sure MS will take some action to consolidate their search share rather than seeing splintered.
DDG is Bing, they use its API to get the search results. They augment it with other sources to provide the "value added" part, but that's a tiny part. DDG doesn't want you to know that it is Bing, but Bing is what it is.
DDG does run ads just like Bing and Google, so it's just a way for Bing to get more search ad inventory out there.
Once upon a time there were other sites that did the same thing with Google, but eventually Google decided they didn't need third parties to drive search traffic.
HN constantly mentions DDG is really just Bing in disguise and they're essentially the same. However, that can't be entirely true because they produce different results for the same search term.
It is Bing, but they seem to use different ranking and filtering on the index.vIf you make complex queries it is quite obvious. Since they have zero transparency the details of their system and deal with bing is unclear.
Between geotargeting and A/B testing and possible differences between the Bing API and public website you really can't conclude that DDG is not just what they get from Bing based on one example.
Funny how the narrative on DDG has changed. I used to get downvoted to oblivion for merely mentioning they used Bing under the hood. Where are all the people that used to defend them so vigorously? I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same people now hating on them.
> I wouldn't be surprised if it's the same people now hating on them.
It seems like those people are still here defending ddg. They are even attacking the blog. Weird.
I use ddg as my default search and hope they are "privacy-first" as they claim ( thought I have my doubts ). At this point what other option is there? DDG search is noticably censored since they rely on bing. It's obvious to anyone who uses ddg regularly. Not sure why people here are making excuses for ddg or pretending otherwise. What I would give to get the google of old.
It's sad looking back on what google used to be. All the freedom and optimism of the 2000s is definitely gone.
Searx. Use Searx. Does your search engine of choice fail to get results that the others pick up? Searx grabs all of them and compiles them together. Don't miss another search result!
Also, proxying increases privacy. Also, it's open source and self-hostable.
Still, it's a valid criticism. How is anyone supposed to know which of the numerous searx instances has what they want. Seems this would really benefit from an instance run by a transparent non-profit organization. You still need to trust someone, you always do, but that doesn't mean that that trust can't be earned rather than just assumed.
It's amazing how much collateral damage is caused by our horrible copyright laws. Mostly just so the MPA/RIAA can protect their roles as gatekeepers of what we're allowed to see and hear.
They can put enormous pressure on even the wealthiest and most powerful companies to act as copyright police on their behalf. Even Google is afraid of them. ISPs are forced to spend huge amounts of time and money working for them. Now duckduckgo is being strong armed into doing a bunch of free work for them too? Maintaining lists of websites and domains to block and removing links to even non-infringing material like youtube-dl just to keep from being sued into the ground.
I don't know what it'll take to rein in these guys, but I doubt the courts will be the ones to do it. So far courts seem fine with the idea that ISPs must permanently ban users from their service over nothing but repeated unsubstantiated claims of infringements which is an insane amount of power to give any industry.
Has any US politician ever run on a platform that includes copyright reform?
Lessig, in particular, doesn't push for throwing out the electoral college all together (to avoid system shock) but rather to move towards proportional representation the state level.
That is, if your state has 10 electors and votes 60:40 R:D, then you should allocate 6 electors for R and 40 electors for D (rather than the current "winner take all" method we do). This kills off gerrymandering as a tool and makes it so that rather than appealing to swing states, presidential candidate would actually have to convince every state that they are the right choice (because you don't just automatically get California. The difference between a 55:45 cali and a 90:10 cali would completely change how you campaign).
Right now, Presidential candidates campaign to swing states which is why you get weird things like presidents talking solely about auto manufacturing or natural gas extraction.
It wasn’t a missed opportunity. It was intentional. When he became popular enough to get into the main debates the Democrat party changed the rules to exclude him.
It has led many to believe the party leaders don’t want his message out there
There is no political will in the US to change the copyright system. Aside from some technologists, I haven't seen anybody who actually wants that. You will anger basically everyone else in the information business. Writers, researchers, artists, architects, musicians, composers, filmmakers, actors, podcasters, even a lot of software developers, you name it. These people all depend on copyright enforcement to get paid.
That to me is the worst thing about repeated phrasing of this as some kind of evil special interest groups against everyone else. The "special interests" here are the people who produce the copyright material you want to access. You have to play ball with them or they will simply not be able to produce those things anymore.
The point is not "consuming things for free", the point is neutering "the Biz".
I for one wouldn't mind to lose Hollywood as an industry, or Broadway, or Silicon Valley...
All of these industries are way too big and over-influential in all aspects of our lives, and leave us without any chance of a more human-scale alternative to counteract.
I mean, how many TV networks are owned by Disney? Do you really think that all that lobbying is just to keep people away from watching copies of Mickey's Fantasia?
It's about all the other movies that don't get to be financed because of the 19th re-hash of Star Wars (or Marvel movie, or live-action remake of Lion King/Aladdin/Pocahontas/Dumbo/Bambi) that is going to be released and it's "guaranteed" to make another billion dollars in the box office.
It's about having two small kids who get bombarded with products from their franchises on every media outlet.
It's about them using their movies and works to promote whatever ideological propaganda that gets them in favor with government.
Film funding is not a zero sum game. There are lots of other places to secure funding. I've seen about 20 new indie films already this year.
The rest of your comment is unrelated and somewhat unhinged, and appears to be going off into a general complaint about advertising, it has nothing to do with copyright.
> I've seen about 20 new indie films already this year.
Good for you! Now go ask the other 99% of the population what they watched this year?
> The rest of your comment (...) has nothing to do with copyright.
It has to do with concentration of power, of which copyright (and any kind of "intellectual property") is one of the favorite instruments from big corporations.
I also used to fall for this "people are free to choose" techno-libertarian bullshit. The problem is that it is not in the interest of all the corporations for you to choose responsibly. They make the game so complex and so energy consuming that eventually people break in one way or another.
"Copyright enforcement" only benefits the big players and the corporate world.
But that's not true, if you didn't have copyright the biggest one would just copy everything and nobody could do anything about it. With copyright you have a way to sue them for ripping you off.
> Disney is not stopping you from making your own home movies.
Excuse me? What if I want to adapt some Hans Christian Andersen story over 150 years old and get a cease and desist from Disney? Even if their adaptations are older than many people alive today.
It means people being forced off the internet because of nothing but unproven accusations because they only have one ISP in their area.
It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.
It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.
It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants
It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.
It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.
It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format.
It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away
If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.
No, it means almost none of that. Pretty much nothing you said has anything to do with copyright law. This is why I have a problem with this rhetoric, it very frequently goes off the rails towards something that doesn't help the goal at all.
> It means people being forced off the internet because of nothing but unproven accusations because they only have one ISP in their area.
This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
>It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.
Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.
>It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.
No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.
>It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants
This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately.
>It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.
This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
>It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.
This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.
>It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format. It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away
No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
>If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.
There's no coherent issue anywhere else in your reply and there's nothing to pay attention to. I've tried to make these comments constructive so maybe that can guide you towards what your real issue is.
> No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
The moment an author makes something public and it gains significant traction is the moment it starts to be part of global culture instead of just only the author's.
Either publish the work with everything that it entails, including archival and assimilation of that work into popular culture, or don't publish at all. If you don't want society to archive your works, then it shouldn't even know of their existence. There's no middle-ground.
> This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
It's a problem regardless. No industry should be allowed to force a 3rd party to cancel your service with them over mere accusations. The fact that there are countless examples of DMCA notices being sent in error, or intentionally sent inappropriately doesn't make the situation any better either. While I agree that ISPs should not be a monopoly and we should all have easy access to high speed connections at low prices from a large number of providers, that's not the reality we live in, it still wouldn't solve the problem since as long as there are finite amount of providers you'll still eventually be able to be kicked offline, and I shouldn't be forced from the provider of my choosing in the first place.
> Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit.
The people who decide not to publish aren't doing it because they fear random lawsuits from random people. Their fear is very specific. They decide not to create or publish their work out of fear of being sued under our overbroad and excessively punishing copyright laws.
Winning doesn't help if you're driven into debt and bankruptcy by the costs. While companies I've never heard of could randomly sue for any reason out of nowhere (a major problem on its own) the risk of that happening to me is very small. For people publishing music (even those within the traditional system) it's much much higher and it's already having an impact. (see: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-copyright-la...)
I don't think this is unintentional. By increasing the risk of creating new works outside of relative safety of the RIAA's umbrella they can silence indie artists who don't want to sign their rights away.
> No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects.
See above - it does stop the creation of new works from people who either can't find the rights to do what they want, can't afford them, or fear the lawsuits they will face if they go ahead anyway. Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues) is a great example of a wonderful creative original work that almost didn't happen because of our insane copyright laws. In the end, the creator was only able to get the work out to the public by releasing it for free and she's still at risk of lawsuits. I recommend reading the copyright section of her FAQ here https://www.sitasingstheblues.com/faq.html
> This never happened.
Strange take in a discussion of Duckduckgo removing links to the project form their search engine and immediately followed by how even though it was wrongfully removed before other people had forks so somehow that didn't matter. It mattered then, just like it matters now that DDG is hiding that tool from the public.
> This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
The censorship issue is concerning what ISPs, hosting services, and search engines are forced to remove. No company should have the power to remove content from the internet without due process and right now, that's not happening.
Youtube pulls content down all the time in response to DMCA notices that should never have been enforced and that content stays down unless the uploader invests significant amounts of time and ...
There are plenty of misunderstandings of copyright law from its detractors but this comment seems to be in places the other side of the coin (plenty of the DMCA's detractors misunderstand it but it's not as common to see a hardline supporter of copyright like yourself who doesn't seem to have heard of the DMCA) and in places failing to recognize that you're engaging in a discussion of whether the law as it exists is good or bad: claiming that our laws cause collateral damage to the public isn't always a "misunderstanding" of the law.
>This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
ISP monopolies aren't due to copyright law but these disconnections are a consequence of copyright law: it is the only reliable way you as a third party can get an ISP to disconnect someone based on unsubstantiated allegations. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is attacking your systems in violation of the CFAA and they'll likely ignore you, maybe they'll ask you to prove it or better yet go after the person doing the hacking. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is file sharing in violation of the Copyright Act, and if they don't meet your demands (which far exceed anything prescribed by the DMCA) they're liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement [1].
>Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.
They can, but the relevant laws and legal precedent decide whether the plaintiff can get a decent lawyer to take their case and whether the suit will survive your first attempt to get it dismissed. The doctrines we have around copyright make it easy to bring claims against infringers and get a court to hear it out. But unintentionally they allow for abuses as "small time" as internet subscribers to be dragged into multiyear lawsuits for file sharing when it later emerges that the plaintiff has - literally - no evidence [2] or as "big time" as Katy Perry getting baselessly sued for using a fairly generic sequence of chords and needing an appeals court to overturn the jury verdict against her [3]. In both of these examples, legislation or new legal precedent could raise the standards for bringing certain types of cases without hurting righteous plaintiffs. On the other hand, in both examples the righteous party eventually won. But in others they lose, or pay a nuisance settlement because the court fight isn't worth it [4]. Frivolous lawsuits are a big problem and aren't at all limited to copyright, but clearly there are features of copyright law that make it attractive for people looking to abuse the legal system.
>No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.
I agree that there's a very common misconception here, but there are two real issues with copyright law that are also being referenced. Copyright law makes it unnecessarily difficult to create derivative works based on very old works that would have passed into the public domain if not for relentless lobbying for longer corporate copyright terms. It might also protect "abandoned" works and works where the corporate copyright holder is defunct too aggressively, there's a good argument for both sides of that issue. But it's an argument to be had over how the law can avoid causing real problems, not a "misunderstanding" of the law.
>This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that p...
It's more nuanced than hand-waving away anyone that wants to talk about copyright reform with neo-capitalist 'everyone will choose to be a freeloader' hyperbole.
"If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay? This represents the difficulty at which we find ourselves straining at the opening of the twenty-first century."
The natural state is that yes, you can share everything since, for things that are intended to be experienced by humans, there are no technical restrictions that do not succumb to the analog hole. So yes, not being able to consume everything for free is collateral damage from copyright and thus to justify copyright you need to demonstrate that their is more gained in return. This is why initial copyright terms were much shorter than they are now - because the deal has always been to encourage the production of more content that then becomes part of the commons, i.e. eventually can be consumed by everyone for free.
What is "everything else" in this context? You're saying that every writer should stop writing books, every artist should stop making art, every musician should stop making music... That is everything as far as our information society goes, there won't be any "everything else" after that.
Do you need me to go around looking for all the declarations from different big name musicians saying how they only really make money on touring, not on the record selling?
How many examples of companies and people working on free software do you need? Or authors that started out writing as a side-gig?
It's simply not true that copyright reform would lead to death of creative works. Most likely the opposite: we would certainly see a reduction in the quantity of works, but those remaining would be working out of pure interest, which would lead me to believe that the average quality would be substantially better.
I'm a musician and I write software, you don't need to preach to me about this. Record sales are indeed dead but there is no chance they'll come back at all without copyright or something like it. Also that doesn't invalidate copyright anyway. Copyright is also an important part of performance, for example the laws about what happens and what royalties you get if somebody else covers your song and profits from it.
Free and open source software is completely dependent on copyright to work, so that's a terrible example.
You can advocate for copyright reform all you want but you misunderstand who you have to please when you do that. It's all those lobbying groups. There's no other groups who would be invested in reforming copyright law. The "quality" you're advocating for here is completely subjective and not up to you or me to decide, even moreso when you try to dismiss all these things that millions of people actually like as "cultural garbage".
> You can advocate for copyright reform all you want but you misunderstand who you have to please when you do that. It's all those lobbying groups.
Or we can simply acknowledge that the whole system is rigged and continue to ignore the laws and get as many people to understand that piracy is the only reasonably moral alternative?
> You have to play ball with them or they will simply not be able to produce those things anymore.
You say that like it's a bad thing. I wish it was that easy to get them to stop producing all that crap, but it seems that the easier it gets to pirate things, the more cultural garbage they produce.
To be clear here, you're saying that you want all writers, researchers, artists, architects, musicians, composers, filmmakers, actors, podcasters, to just stop doing things? Would it make you happy if I just threw out my painting supplies and my clarinet?
So now we're going back to the central point. Before it sounded like you wanted me to "stop producing". Now from this reply, it sounds like you don't actually care if I stop producing, you're just objecting to me getting paid and demanding payment.
That's not a rhetoric and it's also not even close to what I said or what I actually think. Please don't make things up, it's doing a disservice to yourself.
I believe there is a kind of artists dilemma where, one way to put it, we differentiate "commercial art" from "fine art". We put a higher value on the starving artist whose passion for creativity is so consuming, and vision so singular that they will follow their muse irregardless of any financial success.
I exaggerate to make clear the point.
Put another way, if there were no more blockbuster films, indie films would nonetheless still get made. Some people (maybe myself?) would be okay with that.
> Writers, researchers, artists, architects, musicians, composers, filmmakers, actors, podcasters, even a lot of software developers
Plenty of those same people are fed up with copyright law in the US too. There are people releasing their works under more permissive licenses, publishing directly to torrent sites, etc. The fact is that most of the time copyright enforcement doesn't do a damn thing for the creators anyway. They rarely keep the copyright of what they produce. It does however often hinder their ability to work on things they'd like to, and it opens them up to legal risks from others who might claim their works are too close to their own. There's a very real chilling effect where creators may never even publish works out of fear that they'll be dragged into court against a team of industry lawyers. Our excessive copyright and patent system actually hinders more than it encourages new works.
> Rule of thumb, never start a sentence with "There are people", it's very vague and almost meaningless. Always refer to specific groups of people.
This from the person who claims the supporters of our current copyright system are by necessity "Writers, researchers, artists, architects, musicians, composers, filmmakers, actors, podcasters, even a lot of software developers"
Not a terribly specific list there either, but examples of folks fed up with system abound and I'm prepared to offer some to get you started:
There are few people who would say we should abolish copyright entirely, I wouldn't myself, but our current system is broken and creative people in all areas are starting to see that and find workarounds and hope for changes.
> My point is that basically all the lobbying that I've seen representing those groups has been in favor of the copyright system
Those lobbyists aren't representing the artists they are representing the corporations who own the copyrights to the artists' work. Yes, the vast majority of works are still published traditionally under the typical licensees, but the system is designed to keep people doing so under the threat of lawsuits. Having the MPA or the RIAA and their teams of lawyers at your back can give you freedom to create in an environment where it's increasingly risky because of those same organizations and people are just starting to become wise to that.
Researchers? Seriously? What IP do researchers have?
Copyright reform is not “defunding copyright.” It’s a reform. It wouldn’t hurt individuals, unless they are super successful, and even then, not that much. And it helps everyone have higher quality, cheaper content and political freedom.
The problem is simply that the media is once again suppressing the lower/middle class for the one percent, and spreading FUD.
Google also has more resources to fend of lawsuits as well as existing deals with many big copyright holders. The letter of the law is not the only thing that matters, chilling effects are real.
Hmm this will affect me, I always type tpb in ddg to go there. I’m also happy my provider is small and freedom loving so it isn’t blocked (neither is RT for that matter).
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[ 3.3 ms ] story [ 311 ms ] threadAlso, _come on_; if someone gives up after one search term, which also includes advanced site-restricting syntax, there's no way they'd be able to operate youtube-dl anyway: https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtube-dl&ia=web
You can still access it from the results via other sites, like github and wikipedia (which even makes the real website pop up in the info square, funnily enough), but the search results themselves do not contain any links to the main website.
This seems like an oversimplification of things you don't know.
That's pretty easy to check for yourself, usually whenever something does not show up on Bing it won't on DDG either. A good example of that was when the "tank man" picture disappeared from Bing and the exact same thing happened on DDG.
That relationship has reportedly been "paused":
https://www.protocol.com/bulletins/duckduckgo-yandex-ukraine
I used duckduckgo on and off for probably a year ... might as well use Bing if you like it
Yeah, I guess that would probably be useful for something. Academic research into just how awful people are, perhaps. And, of course, as a blackhole list.
Just make sure you get a bulk discount on disk space. Such a list would be huge.
Yes, exactly, I want exactly whatever I search for, including that if that's what I search for.
If I search for something which exists, then I want the knowledge of that existence. The value judgement is no one else's business unless I search for "X but only where approved by any governments or companies with any political or financial interest in controlling what I know."
When it turns out that I would never choose to search for that, that is the proof that it's wrong to be doing it.
There is no reason for legitimate filtering not to be voluntary, like the default porn filter that you have the option to disable.
I still have access to my spam folder, and unsolicited communication is not the same as search results. If I search for something, then I searched for it. I am THE ONLY person who may judge the value of the results.
The search engine's job is only to tell me what's there, not to tell me what I want.
And, repeating, unsolicited communication is different from search results.
But in fact yes I do wish I could trust that my spam folder was actually complete. I find false positives in there all the time. But my point was that even if it's incomplete, you still have a spam folder that you can choose whether to look at or not. The fact that some stuff is filtered by other parties before reaching my client or server is irrelevant.
Running my own crawler is unfortunately not as realistic.
Gonna need a big citation on that. One of my Facebook accounts got banned because I accidentally left my VPN on. Whilst I take responsibility for the terrible opsec, the fact is people get banned all the time for doing things that are anti-Facebook rather than anti-social (anti each other). I would definitely use a social network that doesn’t feel like a police state.
Apparently a lot of people since google processes 6B searches every day?
Pirate Bay actually contains a lot of non-infringing items too.
Who watches the watchers?
Wait, what have they got? Actual Linux ISOs?
Still super disappointing though, and yet another reason why trying to build a better search engine on top of someone else's tech is a non-starter.
If there's a market for alternative search engines out there, AWS is already serving so much of the web that Amazon should really provide crawling and basic indexing (for a fee, of course) so it's done once for everyone, with Amazon Lambda processing to allow search engines to customize their indexing. I'm not sure if it would make them much money, but it makes more sense to start up a search engine on AWS using Amazon's crawl and basic indexing vs. using a search engine competitor's crawl and indexing.
Awful for competition and whatnot.
As it stands, if you want to bootstrap your own search engine, you need to base your search engine on either Google or Bing's index, or perform the herculean task of making your own crawler+indexer+search engine. If Amazon can commoditize the back end, and let AWS-hosted search engines provide differentiators late in the indexing pipeline and on the search/serving side, I think we'd see more niche search engines spring up.
Amazon is a weirdly plausible competitor to Google. They have a surprisingly robust ad business, and obviously AWS.
https://www.cnbc.com/2022/02/03/amazon-has-a-31-billion-a-ye...
The crawling and initial indexing stages need a lot of scaling and performance tuning work, which is a core competency for the AWS engineers. Furthermore, essentially zero people say "I want to build a startup around my new crawl scheduling idea, but it's too time consuming and expensive to write the rest of the search engine." Many more people say "I have a new idea for ranking" or "I have a new idea for content extraction, but it's too expensive and time-consuming to write the rest of a search engine".
Google and Bing already expose "custom search engines" which are basically just filters on top of their search engines. I'm talking about something similar, but much deeper customization.
Also, I was at Goldman when Google Search Appliance was EoL'd. GS had plenty of internal content that needed to be indexed, absolutely needed to be kept private, and wasn't well indexed by any of the replacements GS evaluated. For companies that keep lots of documents in AWS storage, it would be good to open up the space for Google Search Appliance replacements. Amazon could write their own, but given that Google abandoned the space, the profit margins aren't great for a huge company. However, creating a search ecosystem within the AWS ecosystem makes the AWS ecosystem more attractive. Maybe forgoing the search profits and inviting in search providers would be a net win in selling more AWS compute and storage.
Maybe that's the real problem. There have been some recent articles on HN about how "search is broken" and maybe this article falls under that. Because what really gets me is that there is plenty of legit content on "pirate sites" and blocking them completely cuts off that content.
Can anyone recommend a decent non-Google alternative.
The killer feature for me is the ability to up-rank and down-rank sites in my personal results, which has been really helpful for curating my tech-related searches. It allows me to quickly find high-quality docs and eliminate the garbage.
https://github.com/marcocebrian/kagisearchsafari
kagi? are you willing to repeat the same mistakes?
promoting unknown proprietary software, as if it was Moses, yet again
very suspicious, is kagi made by the people who operate DDG? or it's totally "trustable" set of people?
> The killer feature for me is the ability to up-rank and down-rank sites in my personal results
how does that work? is that feature tracked by kagi? are they using it to train a ML model?
Have your own search aggregator.
[0] https://github.com/searxng/searxng
YouTube-DL comes up just fine in search results (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=youtube-dl&t=h_&ia=web).
So does Pirate Bay (https://duckduckgo.com/?q=pirate+bay&t=h_&ia=web).
The headline is outright false.
Compare the following two:
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Athepiratebay.org&t=h_&ia=we...
- https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Aycombinator.com&t=h_&ia=web
Note that if you do a google search (https://www.google.com/search?q=youtube-dl) their website is the first result.
https://ibb.co/tZJcB1M
> A blog where the author paraphrases or copies from the original article/webpage in an attempt to increase his or her own traffic.
Another person as
> loaded with so much foreign material, it refuses to function properly
Since neither of those fit, I guess you mean it more like a random blog that thw owners 'spam' everywhere such as onto link collectors like HN?
Torrentfreak is quite the opposite of that, if that's what you were accusing them of in the first place. One could say that your comment's "headline is outright false"... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TorrentFreak
If you want better results from pirate sites, try Yandex.com. Quite good for finding torrents.
That's because there's no DMCA law there and they're not taking down thousands upon thousands of pages like Google is forced to do every day. [1]
[1] https://www.lumendatabase.org/
Also Yandex removes sites that are banned in Russia, for example BBC in Russian or Navalny's site.
I fear it might only be a matter of time before Yandex stops working too.
btw Baidu is extremely slow due to GFW
you are much better off with Knaben on EU domain, same results can be achieved with add-ons in qbit, then there are special software not worth my time (Jackett)
but I agree I find myself using yandex much more nowadays as alternative
anyterm :: torrent
still returns alot of results for me sofar.
and so does youtube-dl;
top result is :
github.com/ytdl-org
and as youve noticed the repo is still part of search results as well.
If it is just Bing under the hood, how does it exist as business entity. I am sure MS will take some action to consolidate their search share rather than seeing splintered.
It reads like they are saying a website = source, and the hyperlink for the sources is dead.
Their crawler (DuckDuckBot) doesn't have much of an impact on the search results, it's mainly used to provide instant answers. [1]
[1]: https://seirdy.one/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexe...
They provide an alternative branding, targeted at "privacy-aware" users and hipsters.
Once upon a time there were other sites that did the same thing with Google, but eventually Google decided they didn't need third parties to drive search traffic.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=obscure+search+term&ia=web
https://www4.bing.com/search?q=obscure+search+term
That being said, when Bing censored "tank man", DDG's image search also produced 0 results for "tank man".
Do you think they're gearing up for an IPO?
It seems like those people are still here defending ddg. They are even attacking the blog. Weird.
I use ddg as my default search and hope they are "privacy-first" as they claim ( thought I have my doubts ). At this point what other option is there? DDG search is noticably censored since they rely on bing. It's obvious to anyone who uses ddg regularly. Not sure why people here are making excuses for ddg or pretending otherwise. What I would give to get the google of old.
It's sad looking back on what google used to be. All the freedom and optimism of the 2000s is definitely gone.
Also, proxying increases privacy. Also, it's open source and self-hostable.
Self-hosting makes you lose all the benefits of proxying.
In the end be it ddg or searx you can only rely on some third-party trust.
They can put enormous pressure on even the wealthiest and most powerful companies to act as copyright police on their behalf. Even Google is afraid of them. ISPs are forced to spend huge amounts of time and money working for them. Now duckduckgo is being strong armed into doing a bunch of free work for them too? Maintaining lists of websites and domains to block and removing links to even non-infringing material like youtube-dl just to keep from being sued into the ground.
I don't know what it'll take to rein in these guys, but I doubt the courts will be the ones to do it. So far courts seem fine with the idea that ISPs must permanently ban users from their service over nothing but repeated unsubstantiated claims of infringements which is an insane amount of power to give any industry.
Has any US politician ever run on a platform that includes copyright reform?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Lessig_2016_president...
Which is broadly more important than copyright reform…and broadly Americans don’t seem to particularly care about either of them all that much.
Lessig, in particular, doesn't push for throwing out the electoral college all together (to avoid system shock) but rather to move towards proportional representation the state level.
That is, if your state has 10 electors and votes 60:40 R:D, then you should allocate 6 electors for R and 40 electors for D (rather than the current "winner take all" method we do). This kills off gerrymandering as a tool and makes it so that rather than appealing to swing states, presidential candidate would actually have to convince every state that they are the right choice (because you don't just automatically get California. The difference between a 55:45 cali and a 90:10 cali would completely change how you campaign).
Right now, Presidential candidates campaign to swing states which is why you get weird things like presidents talking solely about auto manufacturing or natural gas extraction.
It has led many to believe the party leaders don’t want his message out there
That to me is the worst thing about repeated phrasing of this as some kind of evil special interest groups against everyone else. The "special interests" here are the people who produce the copyright material you want to access. You have to play ball with them or they will simply not be able to produce those things anymore.
"collateral damage" just means...why can't I just consume everything for free, as if it's some human right?
I for one wouldn't mind to lose Hollywood as an industry, or Broadway, or Silicon Valley...
All of these industries are way too big and over-influential in all aspects of our lives, and leave us without any chance of a more human-scale alternative to counteract.
I mean, how many TV networks are owned by Disney? Do you really think that all that lobbying is just to keep people away from watching copies of Mickey's Fantasia?
There's actually lots of good criticisms of Disney, but you didn't mention any of them.
It's about all the other movies that don't get to be financed because of the 19th re-hash of Star Wars (or Marvel movie, or live-action remake of Lion King/Aladdin/Pocahontas/Dumbo/Bambi) that is going to be released and it's "guaranteed" to make another billion dollars in the box office.
It's about having two small kids who get bombarded with products from their franchises on every media outlet.
It's about them using their movies and works to promote whatever ideological propaganda that gets them in favor with government.
The rest of your comment is unrelated and somewhat unhinged, and appears to be going off into a general complaint about advertising, it has nothing to do with copyright.
Good for you! Now go ask the other 99% of the population what they watched this year?
> The rest of your comment (...) has nothing to do with copyright.
It has to do with concentration of power, of which copyright (and any kind of "intellectual property") is one of the favorite instruments from big corporations.
I also used to fall for this "people are free to choose" techno-libertarian bullshit. The problem is that it is not in the interest of all the corporations for you to choose responsibly. They make the game so complex and so energy consuming that eventually people break in one way or another.
"Copyright enforcement" only benefits the big players and the corporate world.
Excuse me? What if I want to adapt some Hans Christian Andersen story over 150 years old and get a cease and desist from Disney? Even if their adaptations are older than many people alive today.
It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.
It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.
It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants
It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.
It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.
It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format.
It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away
If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.
> It means people being forced off the internet because of nothing but unproven accusations because they only have one ISP in their area.
This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
>It means artists who never publish their works because they're afraid of being sued for being a little too close to what someone else did once a century ago.
Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.
>It means creative projects that never get started because while the will is there, the rights needed are impossible to obtain.
No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.
>It means non-infringing works like youtube-dl get silenced and hidden from the public because they are inconvenient to media giants
This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that popped up immediately.
>It means accepting internet censorship without oversight.
This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
>It means DRM crippled hardware that you but are never allowed to own.
This is not related to copyright law. DRM is a purely technical means, not a legal one.
>It means DRM crippled software that can never be preserved and archived in a usable format. It means your culture and your history being paywalled off or locked away
No, it's not your culture or your history, you're not the author. What everyone misses with these comments is that some authors many not want their works to be preserved or archived.
>If you this this is an issue of "I just want free stuff" you clearly haven't been paying attention.
There's no coherent issue anywhere else in your reply and there's nothing to pay attention to. I've tried to make these comments constructive so maybe that can guide you towards what your real issue is.
The moment an author makes something public and it gains significant traction is the moment it starts to be part of global culture instead of just only the author's.
Either publish the work with everything that it entails, including archival and assimilation of that work into popular culture, or don't publish at all. If you don't want society to archive your works, then it shouldn't even know of their existence. There's no middle-ground.
It's a problem regardless. No industry should be allowed to force a 3rd party to cancel your service with them over mere accusations. The fact that there are countless examples of DMCA notices being sent in error, or intentionally sent inappropriately doesn't make the situation any better either. While I agree that ISPs should not be a monopoly and we should all have easy access to high speed connections at low prices from a large number of providers, that's not the reality we live in, it still wouldn't solve the problem since as long as there are finite amount of providers you'll still eventually be able to be kicked offline, and I shouldn't be forced from the provider of my choosing in the first place.
> Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit.
The people who decide not to publish aren't doing it because they fear random lawsuits from random people. Their fear is very specific. They decide not to create or publish their work out of fear of being sued under our overbroad and excessively punishing copyright laws.
Winning doesn't help if you're driven into debt and bankruptcy by the costs. While companies I've never heard of could randomly sue for any reason out of nowhere (a major problem on its own) the risk of that happening to me is very small. For people publishing music (even those within the traditional system) it's much much higher and it's already having an impact. (see: https://www.rollingstone.com/pro/features/music-copyright-la...)
I don't think this is unintentional. By increasing the risk of creating new works outside of relative safety of the RIAA's umbrella they can silence indie artists who don't want to sign their rights away.
> No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects.
See above - it does stop the creation of new works from people who either can't find the rights to do what they want, can't afford them, or fear the lawsuits they will face if they go ahead anyway. Sita Sings the Blues (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sita_Sings_the_Blues) is a great example of a wonderful creative original work that almost didn't happen because of our insane copyright laws. In the end, the creator was only able to get the work out to the public by releasing it for free and she's still at risk of lawsuits. I recommend reading the copyright section of her FAQ here https://www.sitasingstheblues.com/faq.html
> This never happened.
Strange take in a discussion of Duckduckgo removing links to the project form their search engine and immediately followed by how even though it was wrongfully removed before other people had forks so somehow that didn't matter. It mattered then, just like it matters now that DDG is hiding that tool from the public.
> This also never happened and is contradictory to everything else you said, your complaint actually seems to be that there's too much oversight.
The censorship issue is concerning what ISPs, hosting services, and search engines are forced to remove. No company should have the power to remove content from the internet without due process and right now, that's not happening.
Youtube pulls content down all the time in response to DMCA notices that should never have been enforced and that content stays down unless the uploader invests significant amounts of time and ...
>This is not related to copyright law at all. I agree ISP monopolies are a problem, for any number of reasons.
ISP monopolies aren't due to copyright law but these disconnections are a consequence of copyright law: it is the only reliable way you as a third party can get an ISP to disconnect someone based on unsubstantiated allegations. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is attacking your systems in violation of the CFAA and they'll likely ignore you, maybe they'll ask you to prove it or better yet go after the person doing the hacking. Send an ISP letters claiming that a subscriber is file sharing in violation of the Copyright Act, and if they don't meet your demands (which far exceed anything prescribed by the DMCA) they're liable for contributory and vicarious copyright infringement [1].
>Anyone can sue you anytime for any reason, that doesn't mean they'll win the lawsuit. You could make a good argument here about how copyright law is too long, but that point is lost in the rest of the sentence.
They can, but the relevant laws and legal precedent decide whether the plaintiff can get a decent lawyer to take their case and whether the suit will survive your first attempt to get it dismissed. The doctrines we have around copyright make it easy to bring claims against infringers and get a court to hear it out. But unintentionally they allow for abuses as "small time" as internet subscribers to be dragged into multiyear lawsuits for file sharing when it later emerges that the plaintiff has - literally - no evidence [2] or as "big time" as Katy Perry getting baselessly sued for using a fairly generic sequence of chords and needing an appeals court to overturn the jury verdict against her [3]. In both of these examples, legislation or new legal precedent could raise the standards for bringing certain types of cases without hurting righteous plaintiffs. On the other hand, in both examples the righteous party eventually won. But in others they lose, or pay a nuisance settlement because the court fight isn't worth it [4]. Frivolous lawsuits are a big problem and aren't at all limited to copyright, but clearly there are features of copyright law that make it attractive for people looking to abuse the legal system.
>No, that doesn't make any sense. This is a blatant misunderstanding of copyright that I see so often. Copyright doesn't stop you from creating new projects. You don't need to get the rights if it's a fully original work. You could also make a good argument here about how licensing is too difficult to obtain sometimes but that point is also lost.
I agree that there's a very common misconception here, but there are two real issues with copyright law that are also being referenced. Copyright law makes it unnecessarily difficult to create derivative works based on very old works that would have passed into the public domain if not for relentless lobbying for longer corporate copyright terms. It might also protect "abandoned" works and works where the corporate copyright holder is defunct too aggressively, there's a good argument for both sides of that issue. But it's an argument to be had over how the law can avoid causing real problems, not a "misunderstanding" of the law.
>This never happened. Youtube-dl is still up, if I recall for the short period it was taken down there were like 20 forks that p...
"If you could feed everyone on earth at the cost of baking one loaf and pressing a button, what would be the moral case for charging more for bread than some people could afford to pay? This represents the difficulty at which we find ourselves straining at the opening of the twenty-first century."
--- Eben Moglen, speech he gave in 2003 - refer: http://moglen.law.columbia.edu/publications/maine-speech.htm...
They should stop, and we can freely share what's left. Their bullshit crowds out everything else anyway.
How many examples of companies and people working on free software do you need? Or authors that started out writing as a side-gig?
It's simply not true that copyright reform would lead to death of creative works. Most likely the opposite: we would certainly see a reduction in the quantity of works, but those remaining would be working out of pure interest, which would lead me to believe that the average quality would be substantially better.
Free and open source software is completely dependent on copyright to work, so that's a terrible example.
You can advocate for copyright reform all you want but you misunderstand who you have to please when you do that. It's all those lobbying groups. There's no other groups who would be invested in reforming copyright law. The "quality" you're advocating for here is completely subjective and not up to you or me to decide, even moreso when you try to dismiss all these things that millions of people actually like as "cultural garbage".
Or we can simply acknowledge that the whole system is rigged and continue to ignore the laws and get as many people to understand that piracy is the only reasonably moral alternative?
You say that like it's a bad thing. I wish it was that easy to get them to stop producing all that crap, but it seems that the easier it gets to pirate things, the more cultural garbage they produce.
Are you getting paid to produce cultural pollution?
I'm sure back in the day, Salzburg people were also rolling their eye about yet another Requiem.
I believe there is a kind of artists dilemma where, one way to put it, we differentiate "commercial art" from "fine art". We put a higher value on the starving artist whose passion for creativity is so consuming, and vision so singular that they will follow their muse irregardless of any financial success.
I exaggerate to make clear the point.
Put another way, if there were no more blockbuster films, indie films would nonetheless still get made. Some people (maybe myself?) would be okay with that.
Plenty of those same people are fed up with copyright law in the US too. There are people releasing their works under more permissive licenses, publishing directly to torrent sites, etc. The fact is that most of the time copyright enforcement doesn't do a damn thing for the creators anyway. They rarely keep the copyright of what they produce. It does however often hinder their ability to work on things they'd like to, and it opens them up to legal risks from others who might claim their works are too close to their own. There's a very real chilling effect where creators may never even publish works out of fear that they'll be dragged into court against a team of industry lawyers. Our excessive copyright and patent system actually hinders more than it encourages new works.
This from the person who claims the supporters of our current copyright system are by necessity "Writers, researchers, artists, architects, musicians, composers, filmmakers, actors, podcasters, even a lot of software developers"
Not a terribly specific list there either, but examples of folks fed up with system abound and I'm prepared to offer some to get you started:
musicians: https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna7287785 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/lady-gaga-jack-white-norah-jo... https://news.slashdot.org/story/09/05/16/0257212/danger-mous... see also : every artist that defends the use of samples in their works
Writers: http://jakonrath.blogspot.com/2010/05/piracy-again.html https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cory_Doctorow https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_S._Raymond https://www.brandonsanderson.com/warbreaker-rights-explanati...
filmmakers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nina_Paley Luke Thompson (Decay 2012) Michela Ledwidge (sanctuary 2005)
Programmers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Eldred https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hal_Abelson See also: huge swaths of the FOSS movement
Podcasters: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/open-minds-from-creati...
There are few people who would say we should abolish copyright entirely, I wouldn't myself, but our current system is broken and creative people in all areas are starting to see that and find workarounds and hope for changes.
> My point is that basically all the lobbying that I've seen representing those groups has been in favor of the copyright system
Those lobbyists aren't representing the artists they are representing the corporations who own the copyrights to the artists' work. Yes, the vast majority of works are still published traditionally under the typical licensees, but the system is designed to keep people doing so under the threat of lawsuits. Having the MPA or the RIAA and their teams of lawyers at your back can give you freedom to create in an environment where it's increasingly risky because of those same organizations and people are just starting to become wise to that.
Copyright reform is not “defunding copyright.” It’s a reform. It wouldn’t hurt individuals, unless they are super successful, and even then, not that much. And it helps everyone have higher quality, cheaper content and political freedom.
The problem is simply that the media is once again suppressing the lower/middle class for the one percent, and spreading FUD.