Streaky’s Blog

… are lame.

I feel for sites like TPB sometimes. That is I mean, they suck legal defence (“we’re just like Google” indeed), but they must get so many takedown requests for random crap every day than most people get spam.

I get one every few weeks. People like to post NFOs and lists of files on paste2, and somebody comes along and complains about it. The requests to take these posts down annoys me.

Instead of just asking politely at first they start off with the legal threats. “We demand you take blah blah down else we’ll sue you and the next 14 generations of your offspring, fuck you very much”. I’ve had one sat in my inbox for a while from Fox, I keep re-reading it to make sure I wasn’t imagining it’s content.

I’m not a big fan of taking pastes off the site generally, if you think something on the site is infringing somebody’s copyright you’re probably mistaken – it won’t let you posts content as long as books and people can’t upload movies and music, so what’s the deal?

Well it turns out Fox didn’t take too kindly to people posting Wolverine release NFO files. Now I hate TPB’s we’re just like Google defence, because frankly it’s pretty retarded – I don’t disagree in many way’s what they’re trying to do but I think we should all stop for a minute and say it like it is – their defence was pure idiocy. Back to my point though, the majority of the pastes these guys are getting upset about are so many steps removed from copyrighted content it’s not even funny.

Firstly, the stuff Fox got upset about was a bunch of NFO pastes, which if you don’t know what they are, essentially when a group releases something they ripped or whatever, they add a file in which basically says what that release is, which group did it, usually some ASCII art and usually some info about the group (yes I know, I’m trying to do a lazy idiot’s guide to here, ask wikipedia). Anyway, look at the link above, I defy anybody to tell me what IP that paste infringes on.

The other type of takedown I’ve been getting lately are ones where people have been pasting lists of links to download files, I’ve actually been deleting these as requests come in, but I’m getting a bit bored of it really. Paste2 isn’t the problem, it’s people hosting the files, talk to them.

I guess what I’m saying is two things, firstly, I got no issue with NFOs being posted, indeed they arguably have their own artistic merit, at worst are free advertising and it’s not my fault if the studios can’t find a real movie distribution platform that makes people turn to piracy.

Secondly, if I get many more “we demand you” emails for random crap that doesn’t infringe on anything, I’m going to start demanding I ignore such emails and demanding they go to /dev/null. Ask me nicely, and I might play nice. Keep the BS up and I’ll happily call your bluff and see you in court.

Last thing is, the email that I’ve been sat on for a while, that annoys me so much I’ve totally ignored except for looking at every now and then when I need cheering up.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 6:39 AM and is filed under Paste2.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.