Hi, I’m thinking about writing a media piracy tutorial for absolute beginners (think my mother - people who can use browsers and office but that’s about it).
Does anybody know what’s the legislation for that? I’m in the Czech Republic (EU), and the site is hosted on Codeberg pages (Germany). Nameservers for my domain are managed by CloudFlare (USA). So I’m curious about both EU and US laws.
If it’s illegal, can I make it legal by not including any direct links, or stating some “educational purposes only” bullshit?
I feel like the internet is full of that stuff and even GitHub READMEs usually get away with “we don’t condone piracy”, but I also vaguely remember some lawsuit against redditors discussing piracy?
Thanks for advice.
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Forget legality, writing such a guide is just signing up for tech-support into perpetuity.
Every homepage for a BitTorrent client shows using it to download a Linux .iso (GPL) or the short film Big Buck Bunny (Creative Commons).
Maybe make the examples in your guide legal but the steps can be the same as for illegal, e.g. “Here’s how you can use The Pirate Bay & QBittorrent to find & download Big.Buck.Bunny.1080p.mp4”.
Then, when they follow the steps in your guide, they can change Big Buck Bunny to whatever they want to download.
Short answer: it depends on what you write, where you are, and who hosts it. High-level discussion is usually legal. Step-by-step guidance or facilitation of piracy can trigger liability regardless of disclaimers or missing links.
Negate every sentence.
You will not install a VPN. You will not download qbittorrent.
During US prohibition, there were “grape bricks” with warnings not to dissolve in water and place in a cupboard for 20 days, because then it would turn into wine.
A simple negation probably won’t cut it legally (the bricks had a significant legal purpose), but you could probably word it in a similar way. For instance, “While VPNs are effective at anonymizing yourself during piracy, they can also protect your privacy from data mining ad companies”.
At some point, you’ll have to conspicuously avoid the topic and let people infer. Remember when high-speed connections were advertised as being great to “download movie trailers”?
Write a guide on installing uBlock Origin, installing qBittorrent, signing up for a VPN, then binding qBittorrent to the VPN.
That isn’t illegal and will have purposes other than piracy.
That’s the way I will go, although it’s gonna be simpler than torrents.
Each EU country and state has a different set of laws. Think of it this way: if authoritarian jerks always had it their way it would be illegal to use an ad-blocker, send encrypted messages to your contacts, own a house, get a prescription for much needed medicine or even sit close to a person of a different skin color.
In uncertain times use pseudonyms, hide your tracks, keep things clean and tidy and leave your own party early.
But please if you’re sure the info you’re sharing could benefit most people break free from the abuse of, let’s say some Big Tech company, keep it up and count with my blessing. 💪💛I looked into existing Czech court cases and it’s a mess. People got sentenced just for sharing links, but also the Czech Pirate Party ran a regular pirate series streaming website with embeds and everything and won the case against them.
I could do it anonymously for sure, but I ask because I would like to post it to my website.
please do not use cloudflare. it’s risking everyone’s privacy and security. they may seem like the most inconspicuous part of your dependencies, but actually are the weakest/ most dangerous part. i think codeberg tends to be supportive and the right place, but cloudflare is 99.9% gonna snitch on all of your readers.
Unfortunately something like it is needed to stop bots. The reason why Lemmy isn’t completely overrun by bots and spam is because the big instances run Cloudflare in the background and require a captcha to sign up.
Does this apply when I use it only for DNS? No proxy, none of their weird services, just DNS records…
DNS is the most important foundational stone. Whoever controls your DNS can redirect all of your users to any address they want AND present a valid TLS cert through a DNS challenge. They can also redirect all E-Mails of the associates domain, and if any address was used to register an account, they can reset that accounts password. Trusting someone to handle your DNS is the highest trust you can put on someone on the internet. And that is both for a website povider trusting the registrar of their domain and for a end user with their DNS resolver.
