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.
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.
That sounds like the best way to do it. I can link to the piracy websites so people can find old niche movies with copyright expired or something.
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.
Does this apply when I use it only for DNS? No proxy, none of their weird services, just DNS records…
so, whilst the other comments want through the risks of using cloudflare, i’d like to point out that hetzner DNS is free, easy to use, and a european solution. so, if you’re really not using any of the cloudflare features, its just as simple if not simpler to avoid that internet monopoly and use hetzner.
I use cloudflare tunnels, but for a different subdomain so it shouldn’t matter for the primary domain and safety of its visitors.
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.
That seems way beyond my threat model, but maybe I don’t fully understand the risks.
Cloudflare cannot track visitors of my website, the only malicious thing they can do is to tamper with my DNS record. While they are almost surely an intelligence asset, that would greatly damage their reputation for negligible gain (my website is a static site with like 2 visitors including me).
Am I correct, or did I miss something? I don’t have an email address on my domain, so that’s ok.
Yes, cloudflare will not tamper with your record because you are not important enough to be worth the reputation loss. Realistically, no harm will come to you from cloudflare.
However! They are still the party that could theoretically cause the largest amount of damage to both you and your users.
Cloudflare cannot track visitors of my website, the only malicious thing they can do is to tamper with my DNS record.
They “cannot” only because they say so. Changing your DNS record allows them to read 100% of all incoming traffic even if it is TLS encrypted (because they can acquire a valid TLS certificate for your domain through a DNS challenge).
Thanks. I’m aware of the theoretical risks and how bad cloudflare is for the internet as a whole. Sadly, I use Cloudflare tunnels for a different subdomain. While I would like to move to some alternative in the long term, it just works™ right now and I don’t really have the energy to touch it.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Anarchist_Cookbook
That’s legal in the US so a guide to internet piracy certainly would be.
If you want to be overly cautious you can write it as a guide to using the exact same process to download media that’s already passed into the public domain. Nothing illegal about downloading things that aren’t protected by copyright. That the same process can be used to download pirated media is just a coincidence.
I don’t know anything about relevant laws in the EU, Czech Republic, or Germany.
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.
Forget legality, writing such a guide is just signing up for tech-support into perpetuity.
I think it might help many people and I can just state that I’m not providing any support. I don’t have comments on my website yet, and they will be via Mastodon anyways, where most people already know this stuff. If somebody does the work to find my email, I can just ignore them ¯\(ツ)/¯
I also taught my closest family members to pirate movies and shows and it has had the exact opposite effect - no more calls to help them download a movie they want to watch on a flight tomorrow :)
This is off topic and I hope that you take it in the spirit offered. I can never decide if it’s rude or helpful but the intent is to be helpful.
Teach is one of a handful of words in English that doesn’t follow the normal rules for it’s past tense form. The past tense for teach is taught. I honestly can’t tell you how to identify which words use a different form for their past tense. I think it’s just something that you learn through experience.
https://www.esl-lounge.com/reference/grammar-reference-most-common-irregular-verb-list.php
Thanks, I fixed it. To my defense, I’m sick and my brain has been a bit fogged in the last few days.
Unless your writing is going to be greatly different from FMHY, I’d partner with them on the hosting so you only have to focus on the writing.
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”?
I highly doubt any judge would take that into account. You can probably get away with listing the pirate websites “so people can block them”, but I don’t think you can do that with a full step-by-step tutorial. I would be very curious about a precedent though.
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.
Ask yourself: are you ready that if push comes to shove, that your life is derailed for years by lawsuits, lawyer meetings, court orders, cops raiding your home, and financial hardship because of all this? if the answer is no, you have to make sure this is not traceable back to you. I admire your aspirations, but don’t ruin your life over it.
Edit: and that is not even taking into account what might happen if you lose in court, with the very real possibility of loss of freedom and/or life-destroying fines.
It’s a very personal decision. I won’t say someone’s braver or stupider for coming forward in support or confession of doing something that might be interpreted as illegal today or down the road. But that person, if chased by authorities, could either become a head on a flag or a head on a pike. They could become the reason everyone pushes back or the reason everyone runs and hides.
So I’d say, under doubt start with an alias. Own it publicly when you’re confident doing so will improve things for yourself and others.
