1. Posts must be related to the discussion of digital piracy
2. Don’t request invites, trade, sell, or self-promote
3. Don’t request or link to specific pirated titles, including DMs
4. Don’t submit low-quality posts, be entitled, or harass others
💰 Please help cover server costs.
You could do unintentional linking if you don’t want to be subject to DMCA claims, like putting in the description
“We do not provide support for external projects that use our code, like shadow-website. Please contact them for further assistance.”
or
“If you’re using external services like shadow-website, please say so while reporting issues/bugs.”
This gives off an air of legitimacy to the shadow-website to anyone who’s interested in looking at mothership, but doesn’t explicitly associate it with mothership.
I can see why even Reddit wouldn’t want this posted over there.
So, okay, you’ve made up a scenario but it has nothing to do with the question you’re asking. Why couldn’t you have just asked the question and not beat around the bush before doing so?
What makes it “illegal”?
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Quotation marks are not only used for direct quotations, despite the name. The question is valid.
I didn’t say you did. Your question implies that there must be a reason why the listing of resources in the megathread is considered “legal”. I am flipping the question around and asking you - why must this be the case? Do you believe there is something inherently “illegal” about the megathread? If so, what?
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I remember not long ago Nintendo attacked the emulators and won, they didn’t attack reddit. So yeah, you might be not OK offering this emulator.
Historically, it seems like the legality is a bit fluid, and depends on how much money someone is willing to spend to stop you. What the Pirate Bay did was legal in Sweden until the big companies applied pressure and resources to stop them. I wish we lived in a world where laws could be interpreted clearly, but at least it seems like big money can have its way regardless. So, in your hypothetical website scenario, would someone powerful be very upset, or would it not be worth it for them to go after you?
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do the thing first - nobody is going to find out about it for a while, which gives you time to think and build a defence
if it gets successful, then worry about takedowns
worst that happens is it goes away
The links themselves can’t really be copyrighted.
I guess some people just don’t care and do it anyways. And I’m not sure how much the copyright industry and courts care about people chatting about copyright infringement and not actually doing it at that place. Could be protected by free spech in some jurisdictions. You can obviously live in a place that doesn’t care about copyright. But I guess people don’t move across the world just for that.
You could find bulletproof hosting pay anonymously and take care to never mention any personal information about you. But given what you said, that’s not what you want. I’d split responsibility between several people and let someone else do the copyright infringement. Someone who lives someplace else and doesn’t engage themselves on the website. And focus on the development and the legal aspect of it. Or just do the illegal part and not do the software. But I imaging it’s really complicated to do both sides of that coin in one person… And I suppose running an illegal website costs more money than running a regular one.
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That’s a good idea. I think it’s a bit problematic under these circumstances since OP wants to host game files which are probably some larger binaries. And that’s going to show a different usage pattern and more traffic than the usual code. I don’t know if they monitor things like that and remove these repos. But I have to remember that idea.
And an idea regarding the links: I’ve tried some emulators and do some retrogaming every now and the. Usually these projects take some care to not list the sites with the ROM collections on their official pages. As a user you usually go to archive.org and download things from there or scroll through their forum or subreddit and that kind of info pops up pretty quickly. So once they have an active community it spreads via word of mouth. Maybe you can also post a sticky you’re not affiliated with websites like X and Y, but you’d have to ask a lawyer if that’s alright.
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