I am tired, in general, of single topics taking over the entire internet. In that regard crypto and AI are not that different. For a few weeks it was amusing, now I'm simply tired. And the next thing will tire me too.
Alphabet is valued at over 1.5 Trillion dollars. If they pay 1 Billion USD in fines per year, maybe their lawyers are actually doing an ok job for their client.
I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?
> I've yet to see Google not return a piratebay link at any point in history. Is it a loophole where they take it down, but their indexer then immediately puts it back in the next pass, lol?
No. If you pay attention there can be a message at the bottom of the search results telling you how many results were removed due to takedown requests. IIRC, they used to even link directly to the request, but now I think you have to jump through hoops to see it.
The "loophole" is that a takedown request has to be for a specific URL, so it requires a lot of constant effort to even try to get them all. Pirate Bay always had dupes and a million mirrors.
I'm not being nit-picky or contentious - I'm asking from a genuine point of curiousity ...
but in the case of Google linking to the pirate bay, isn't the pirate bay the one linking to the pirated content? Google is 1 step removed in that node graph because they are just linking to the pirate bay.
I guess if they directly linked to a pirate bay page that had a magent link on it .... maybe (?)
Google seems to refuse removing because, according to them, "Whole-site removal is ineffective and can easily result in censorship of lawful material."
Instead of removing, they just remove links by request.
Isn't this the same loophole that MegaUpload used? Only removing a link to a file, not the file itself with the claim that other links belonged to potentially lawful owners of the file.
I mean, if the subpoena says "remove a link" you comply with that.
But there's also another fundamental difference: even if there's the expectation of removing all copies of the same exact file, it is "trivial" for MegaUpload to know, by using hashes. They do have access to all files, as it is in their servers.
For Google to delete all pirate links to movie X it would be much more complicated, and would put them on a position of being forced to be the internet police.
A court is unlikely to care about the distinction between actually linking to pirated content, and linking to a page with both instructions and a link to the pirated content. To add, enough TPB torrents contain screenshots.
Also, Google's takedown request handling in Google Search is not a matter of DMCA or a legal matter at all - instead, it's like Content ID, where they have their own system for evaluating takedown requests separate from any law. Rights-holders can still send Google legal requests, but it's easier to go through the expedited processes Google provides that also won't increase rights-holders' liability if they happen to submit a false takedown.
It's been 5 or 6 years ago now, but one night I searched for torrents for a particular movie, and Google returned hundreds of results from a dozen sites... and the next evening they returned 0. I think it was an October.
While I don't doubt that a torrent link shows up once in awhile, Google no longer usefully searches for such things. Or really anything, legal or not. It's more like a purchase recommendation system pretending to be a search engine.
At the bottom there is a message that says "In response to a legal request submitted to Google, we have removed 4 result(s) from this page. If you wish, you may read more about the request at LumenDatabase.org" and links to https://lumendatabase.org/notices/27615507
Google will only remove specific URLs, not entire sites/domains. Even if every copyright holder with content on TPB sent a DMCA notice to Google today, new torrents -- at new URLs -- would pop up tomorrow.
Can't speak for rarbg, but plenty of piracy adjacent sites have a DMCA takedown program[0] to operate under this loophole. That way, most content survives but they are "protected"
That’s why magnet links were invented for torrents. They don’t link to any content, just give your client a unique ID to find peers for.
Like saying a site mentioning that you should look for “cannabis” if you want to get high is illegal. Selling the substance is illegal, telling you how it’s called isn’t.
It doesn't link to a file or embed any tracker names but it does name a 1080p HEVC (x265) encoded season pack of season 5 of a US police procedural drama (which is excess and unrequired but humans do like readable names)
What it does provide is a unique hash code that matches the exact torrent ... should you find it.
When you add that magnet link to your torrent client it triggers the act of polling any public trackers your client knows about and any peers that have "hit me up about magnets" enabled.
Ideally word spreads and eventually some other client | tracker hits you back with word of other peers that at least have some cannabis .. (err, bits of Rizzoli&Isles Season 5 HEVC pack).
A magnet URI is a little bit like a web link in the sense that it refers to a particular piece of data, but it doesn't point to any particular host or location. It is merely a hash of the files it describes. So in other words, the link doesn't tell you where the particular content can be found, it only tells you what the content is that it refers to.
To actually find the content in question you take the link, go on a peer to peer network, and basically ask machines if they have the content in question available or know where it is. There's various ways to do that, in some cases your torrent app might know the location of some centralized "tracker" servers, and ask those servers whether they know locations for those files. Some torrents are "trackerless" and use a DHT, a type of distributed database that keeps information about where to find files.
And you can't drop them, you can't crush them to make them take up less space in the rubbish... they are objectively worse in all regards I can think of
Imagine how bloody annoying it would be if we had to bring a bag full of empty glass bottles to the supermarket every time we wanted them refilled. Thank God for plastic
i do this and it is not as annoying as you're making it out to be. you get used to the process and, as a reward, you and your fellow earth inhabitants don't have to deal with all of the waste later.
Yeah but this doesn’t scale. Like, there’s an assumption in these conversations that okay — glass bottles are better, but does that mean that now I’m going to hold on to and reuse every single glass bottle I ever receive from now on? Realistically? Then extend that to everything you use.
I can imagine ending up with a house full of glass bottles. Where does it reasonably stop for the individual?
The conversation also highlights that our intuitions about what the most environmentally friendly thing is can’t be trusted.
Back before plastics took over everything, not all products were packaged in glass containers. Many were packaged in metal, paper, or cardboard containers. Examples:
Glass container (not reused): Ovaltine
Paper container (not reused): Chips Ahoy cookies
Cardboard container (not reused): washing detergent powder
Metal container (not reused): Hershey's chocolate powder
The easiest option of dealing with plastic waste is just throwing it out your window and letting the litter pile up. Obviously people don’t do this because it has negative externalities that are undesirable.
Imagine living 5 minutes from the supermarket. Then you could walk 5 minutes one way, and 5 minutes the other, adding up to 10 minutes total. Problem solved.
