Rules Change: Piracy

This has come up a few times recently, but it's not actually in the rules. Simply put, piracy or discussion of piracy is illegal and as such is not allowed on this forum. I suggest that discussing or suggesting piracy result in three points, and actually providing a link to pirated material result in five points. These points will not be retroactively applied to the users in question, as they've already received a 1-day ban for the discussion.

Why should discussing piracy be outlawed? That's going into the foggy freedom vs well-being debate. If I think that piracy is ok because a company is selling a product that was released by the makers as 'open source', I should be able to say so!


EDIT: Now this is unacceptable. You have violated the well-established point system and have gone ahead and banned 2? people for something that isn't law yet. Without a ban-council. I think this warrants an investigation/review.

That was me, and it was on Shiva's direction, because of:

Forumotion Terms of Service wrote:

Illicit contents

Forums that does welcome or promote warez, piracy, hacking, cracking, spamming, attacks against networks or servers, pornography, racial hatred, crimes against humanity, inappropriate activities on the servers, or any other actions which violate any applicable laws, aren't allowed. Any forum which contains texts, links, pictures, animations, videos or any other content recognized as Illegal will be deleted without notice or warning. Forumotion.com reserves the right to delete any accounts or forums considered not conform to the rules quoted here or specified in Forumotion.com or in the international website rules according to the international internet law. Any Illegal content or act and will be reported to the concerned services and prosecuted.

Responsibilities

From the company: The information which are conveyed on the site are supplied in their integrity. The company doesn't give any guarantee, explicit or implicit, and doesn't assume any responsibility related to the use of these informations.
These informations might be modified or updated without prompt.

From the user: The user of the site is held responsible of any damage of any kinds, material or immaterial, indirect, caused to any third-party, including Forumotion.com, by the fact of the illicit use or exploitation of the site itself or one of its elements, whatever the cause and the location of the damages, and guarantees Forumotion.com from the consequences of the complaints or legal action he might be faced to.
The user of Forumotion.com renounces to take any legal action against Forumotion.com in case of legal proceeding taken by a third-party against him by the fact of the illicit use, and/or the exploitation of the site of Forumotion.com.

As you can see, a few people talking about pirate stuff and such could result in termination of service.

Problem is when you put a line. I think that sharing an older version of a minecraft.jar is not piracy. It won't grant you access to the game if you don't have either the official or cracked launchers which will give you access anyway. I won't support starting threads about "Where can I get a crack ?" etc. but I won't ban people for that nor deny them the opportunity to share content that in my opinion is not harmful, such as the jars. Also if they stop to provide forum access it's for the good , you will finally move on to a better forum .

I agree with LJS. Piracy is illegal, and will be delt withh harshly.

May I just raise one point, there have been many people posting links or songs or other music that is hosted on YouTube, now many of these videos don't have permission from the owners of the material, so therefore you could say these videos are piracy.

With this rule change, are you now going to go round and ban everyone who posted a link to YouTube containing copyrighted material? Because if you intend to have zero tolerance on piracy, you would have to do that, and that is, quite frankly ridiculous, for most forum members will have done something like this at some point.

So if you can define piracy in more detail, that would be useful (e.g. What counts as piracy) I agreed with IV, sharing an older version of minecraft is ok if you already own the game, in fact there are special version changers available which do such a thing, and sharing a YouTube vid should be ok, but posting stuff like torrents for premium software would be illegal

Now I see my errors.

But ya. You're going a little to harshly with that. LEGAL programs already exist that allow you to downgrade .jars. If i'm not mistaken, Mojang is hosting all of their old .jars now...

Explicitely illegal things, like torrents and cracks and such, I can see the reason why to harshly punish. But others, no.

Vinyl and Shadowcat were discussing cracks for Kerbal Space Program.

Prototype wrote:

May I just raise one point, there have been many people posting links or songs or other music that is hosted on YouTube, now many of these videos don't have permission from the owners of the material, so therefore you could say these videos are piracy.

With this rule change, are you now going to go round and ban everyone who posted a link to YouTube containing copyrighted material? Because if you intend to have zero tolerance on piracy, you would have to do that, and that is, quite frankly ridiculous, for most forum members will have done something like this at some point.

So if you can define piracy in more detail, that would be useful (e.g. What counts as piracy) I agreed with IV, sharing an older version of minecraft is ok if you already own the game, in fact there are special version changers available which do such a thing, and sharing a YouTube vid should be ok, but posting stuff like torrents for premium software would be illegal

The OP specifically says that points will not be applied retroactively. Sharing old minecraft.jars is illegal, and is strictly forbidden on the MCF. It should be the same here. Legal programs exist the let you downgrade a .jar to prevent people from simply distributing old ones. Those downgraders, like MCNostalgia, do their work without distributing any of Mojang's code, because distributing that code is a crime. If you want an old .jar, by all means use a downgrader, where it's legal, but don't come here and ask someone else to commit a crime so you can have your old game.

Bluh Bluh Bluh lets just move to another site and be guided by our own questionable moral compass instead the threat of exile.

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

The OP specifically says that points will not be applied retroactively. Sharing old minecraft.jars is illegal, and is strictly forbidden on the MCF. It should be the same here. Legal programs exist the let you downgrade a .jar to prevent people from simply distributing old ones. Those downgraders, like MCNostalgia, do their work without distributing any of Mojang's code, because distributing that code is a crime. If you want an old .jar, by all means use a downgrader, where it's legal, but don't come here and ask someone else to commit a crime so you can have your old game.

What MCnostalgia does is distributing the code... If Mojang is that concerned with those jars they could at least put an effort to secure their code.

Actually it doesn't. Theres a hidden patches folder, which contains the .jars for all versions. It just replaces them and makes it work. If you don;t have it, it downloads it from Mojang's hosting, as it contains all of the patches there too.

So it's LEGAL.

Iv121 wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

The OP specifically says that points will not be applied retroactively. Sharing old minecraft.jars is illegal, and is strictly forbidden on the MCF. It should be the same here. Legal programs exist the let you downgrade a .jar to prevent people from simply distributing old ones. Those downgraders, like MCNostalgia, do their work without distributing any of Mojang's code, because distributing that code is a crime. If you want an old .jar, by all means use a downgrader, where it's legal, but don't come here and ask someone else to commit a crime so you can have your old game.

What MCnostalgia does is distributing the code... If Mojang is that concerned with those jars they could at least put an effort to secure their code.

Technically all mods distribute fractions of the minecraft code, just not enough to run the actual game, but it's still distributing code.

And mojang have a stupid amount of money (and a relatively small staff), why would they care about securing their code.

And Mojang supports modding...

Which is why they break all of them every two weeks and keep pushing the Modding API back, yes?

Prototype wrote:

Iv121 wrote:

Last_Jedi_Standing wrote:

The OP specifically says that points will not be applied retroactively. Sharing old minecraft.jars is illegal, and is strictly forbidden on the MCF. It should be the same here. Legal programs exist the let you downgrade a .jar to prevent people from simply distributing old ones. Those downgraders, like MCNostalgia, do their work without distributing any of Mojang's code, because distributing that code is a crime. If you want an old .jar, by all means use a downgrader, where it's legal, but don't come here and ask someone else to commit a crime so you can have your old game.

What MCnostalgia does is distributing the code... If Mojang is that concerned with those jars they could at least put an effort to secure their code.

Technically all mods distribute fractions of the minecraft code, just not enough to run the actual game, but it's still distributing code.

And mojang have a stupid amount of money (and a relatively small staff), why would they care about securing their code.

No. Mods can't distribute unedited class files any more than you can. This is why mods have complicated installation procedures instead of just giving you a .jar with the mod installed. They care about securing their code because it is their intellectual property, and they'd like to continue making money instead of having new users just get the game for free, like they would if pirated .jars were more available. DISTRIBUTION OF ALL OR PART MINECRAFT.JAR IS A CRIME, and no amount of poor logic or attempted justification will change that fact.

It doesnt matter what you do, eventually you get an unprotected jar full of code. With this code you can do whatever you please because nobody bothered to protect it.

Iv121 wrote:

It doesnt matter what you do, eventually you get an unprotected jar full of code. With this code you can do whatever you please because nobody bothered to protect it.

NO! You can't, Iv! Distributing that jar is ILLEGAL! I don't understand what's so hard about this. Giving someone else a minecraft.jar is a CRIME.

I'm not planning to distribute jars here , but just to let you know if someone dares to post here a picture that he didn't make or that he edited ( like your universe map - roleplay subforum) its a CRIME ! As bad as jar publishing ! And I won't start to ask for copyright on every picture I'm going to post in a remote forum.

Look, this thread isn't calling for what constitutes piracy, it calls for users and mods alike to keep on the lookout for discussions of illegal activities.

If it's in the gray area, better safe than sorry. The last thing we need is to have this forum locked down.

e: Also, there's a huge difference between run-of-the-mill plagiarism and blatant piracy.

Really ? If I steal a literature composition and use it without the author's permission, without paying him or anyone else paying him, isn't it the same as if I download a cracked game and share the crack address with the others ? Either way the creator is not getting paid. I doubt anyone will bother with this forum anyway, if they didn't bother for the pictures they won't bother for the jars as for them they are the same.

Most of the pictures you're citing as a reason are freely available on the internet and are drawn from media-sharing sites. If the creators did not want them to be visible to the world, surely they could have used more privatized image upload sites?

Look Iv, you bring up a valid point, but this isn't a thread for what is illegal and what is not, it is concerning the implementation of a rule that should be a given considering the forum host's terms of service. We will have to cross the bridge of what constitutes piracy when we come to it.

People miss the point, if the forum is at have a total anti-piracy law, mods will have to eliminate every thing which could infringe copyright (including images, links, even ship designs (yes, these could be called copyright infringement)) which would be, frankly, stupid and difficult, so I say instead of having an anti-piracy law, narrow it down, make it a ban on:

Posting links to cracked games

Posting links to movies

Discussing how to achieve the above

Allow any pictures, YouTube links, links to other websites that do not violate this and anything else that does not violate this

This isn't total anti piracy, it just stops people from pirating the bits where the intellectually property of the companies is supposedly more important than your human right (not quite true, but many people think that)