"Offensive Content" nonsense clauses in websites terms of service piss me off!

So for a few years I've been posting music to my soundcloud account, mostly extreme metal I write for two solo artist of mine. As of late, a theme has popped into my lyrics, a not-so-clean theme that I don't normally write about, wanking. But since I am massively pro-wanking(tm) I decided to write 2 songs about it. So I uploaded one, not realizing, that soundcloud's terms of service say you can't do that, your content cannot be sexually explicit.... WTF! Here is the exact text from the terms and services section:

"Representations and Warranties

You hereby represent and warrant to SoundCloud as follows:
(i) Your Content, and each and every part thereof, is an original work by you, or you have obtained all rights, licences, consents and permissions necessary in order to use, and (if and where relevant) to authorise SoundCloud to use, Your Content pursuant to these Terms of Use, including, without limitation, the right to upload, reproduce, store, transmit, distribute, share, publicly display, publicly perform, make available and otherwise communicate to the public Your Content, and each and every part thereof, on, through or via the Website, any and all Services and any Linked Services.
(ii) Your Content and the availability thereof on the Platform does not and will not infringe or violate the rights of any third party, including, without limitation, any intellectual property rights, performers’ rights, rights of privacy or publicity, or rights in confidential information.
(iii) You have obtained any and all necessary consents, permissions and/or releases from any and all persons appearing in Your Content in order to include their name, voice, performance or likeness in Your Content and to publish the same on the Platform and via any Linked Services.
(iv) Your Content, including any comments that you may post on the Website, is not and will not be unlawful, offensive, abusive, libellous, defamatory, obscene, racist, sexually explicit, ethnically or culturally offensive, indecent, will not promote violence, terrorism, or illegal acts, or incite hatred on grounds of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation.
(v) Your Content does not and will not create any liability on the part of SoundCloud, its subsidiaries, affiliates, successors, and assigns, and their respective employees, agents, directors, officers and/or shareholders.
SoundCloud reserves the right to remove Your Content, suspend or terminate your access to the Platform and/or pursue all legal remedies if we believe that any of Your Content breaches any of the foregoing representations or warranties, or otherwise infringes another person's rights or violates any law, rule or regulation."

Look at part 4 above:

"Your Content, including any comments that you may post on the Website, is not and will not be unlawful, offensive, abusive, libellous, defamatory, obscene, racist, sexually explicit, ethnically or culturally offensive, indecent, will not promote violence, terrorism, or illegal acts, or incite hatred on grounds of race, gender, religion or sexual orientation."

So basically they are not allowing people to upload merely offensive content of any kind. Define offensive? Some lyrics I write might offend the idiots out there? In fact you can say that any content can be offensive, because there will always be someone who will find it offensive.

Notice that it also outlaws "culturally offensive content". WTF! Define culturally offensive. That is a complete subjective statement. Someone can find a song's lyrics about zombies eating babies to be offensive or "culturally offensive". It's stupid, vague and idiotic that that, sexually explicit, obscene and indecent content are not allowed...... They are vague, subjective content definitions that all require the person 'offended' by them to find them offensive for it to be any of those..... Not objective. Is our country and our Internet such a nanny state now that offensive content has to be gotten rid of... For the children? WTF!


Also, what the fuck is the problem with sexually explicit  content? Both youtube and Soundcloud block this stuff and it's completely normal and natural. Yet in this world it's horribly offensive to even mention any kind of sexual content in lyrics. It's like 'all mentions of sex = bad for a children's mind so we need to get rid of it'.  It's stupid.

It's really lucky of me to upload the music lyrics I do which can fit into some of these categories and not be deleted yet. I have had some suspicious problems with my soundcloud accounts in the past so maybe. I wish soundcloud would get rid of the 'offensive','abusive','culturally offensive','obscene',and 'indecent' clauses.  It isn't needed. People offended by lyrics can put them in categories like this to get them taken down and that is NOT the way the Internet should work.

I'm not happy about this. This crap should not be on the Internet at all. Subjective content restrictions need to be Gotten rid of, completely. They don't do anything positive. They just prevent people from being offended. It's like accidentally or purposely offending people is a crime now. It shouldn't be. Guess what folks.... you have the right to be offended. You have no right whatsoever to be shielded from offensive content because that's fucking stupid. End of story.

The Trans-Pacific partnership is BAD for the internet

I've been writing about the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) for a few days on my other anti-censorship blog, Debunking utter Nonsense. Basically TPP is a huge and secret treaty among "pacific" countries that would (among other scarier things) force them all to incorporate extreme, unfair and downright stupid copyright laws, not limited to forcing internet intermediaries (google, etc) to filter and block any content accused of "alleged" copyright infringement (aka no proof needed), as well as ISP's having to shut down access to the people accused and forcing the ISP's to tell the copyright holders about any of these people accused of "alleged" copyright infringement.

The other things it would allow corporations to do, that is quite scary, is sue an entire company if  their laws don't favor that corporation, raise the price of medicine, lower food standards, and many more scarier things. But this article has to do with it's possible effect on the internet as a whole, as a huge IP section which was leaked, shows how far the mega corporations in the music industry want to mess up our net freedom for profit.

To make things worse, as I mentioned in the previous article, temporary copies found on people's computers would be enough to make someone liable for copyright infringement, if found by "deep packet inspection", a technique ISPS would be forced to use to find these temporary copies, which are downloaded in the thousands everytime someone watches 1 youtube video, listens to 1 streamed song off of sites like  soundcloud, reverbnation, purevolume, etc, all specializing in hosting indie music artists music.  The content doesn't even HAVE to be infringing any copyright for the holder to take action, remember how many fraudulent content ID claims youtube allows, because youtube does not require proof the copyright holder actually holds the copyright! If TPP and the necessary Copyright laws pass this will only increase, by the thousands! Now let me tell you how easy it would be for temporary copies of an infringing work to get onto someones hard drive without them actually downloading them.....

Hypothetical situation A:

Some bar is blasting pop music.  The bar's radio station of choice has the right to play the music. Some guy happens to be walking outside filming himself going to the bar, for some other reason. The music ends up on his video. He uploads it to youtube.  The video is immediately marketed on google like all youtube video's are, by making it go into the search results.  Someone finds the video. He watches it on his PC. Without his knowledge, around 1000+ temporary copies are created PER viewer, that don't go away till the viewers clear their cache. And even if they do clear the cache, the damage has been done. Deep packet inspection would have found them the instant they are downloaded, because deep packet inspection involves looking at everything someone downloads with extreme scrutiny while the packets are moving from the youtube site to the person viewing it.  The ISPS would be legally forced to copy these packets and send them to  the government authority in charge of figuring out which ones could be infringing, which would look at them closely to find out if a "temporary" copy is inside any of them and if it's infringing, according to them.  IF The infringing song is found in the packets, the person is then liable for copyright infringement, even though he didn't actually steal anything!

Hypothetical Situation B:

Repeat the above scenario with the following changes.  The video' audio is cut out and replaced with a song the person happens to like. Now the person uploading IS guilty of copyright infringement. But that's not the point. The song is popular and makes the video even more popular. 90% of the viewers don't know of the song, but every single one of these viewers has 1000+ of these "temporary" copies on their hard drive. And because of the deep packet inspection, each and every one of these viewers, even ones who accidentally viewed the video when youtube automatically played it in part of a playlist due to an error or on purpose, are all guilty of 1000+ counts of copyright infringement under TPP!

The real problem, as highlighted by a blog post I did on Debunking Utter Nonsense, is that several key immunities offered by current US copyright law are thrown out the window, by the TPP. The TPP says that all copyright infringement, even accidental, and non-profit infringement, is considered criminal infringement. The US copyright law requires that a minimum profit of $1000 be made before the law says it is criminal infringement.  Under copyright law, the copyright moguls have to specify each individual infringing link on a site to take it down. Not so in TPP. TPP basically allows them to say "this site is filled with infringing links" (WITHOUT proof) and it's ok to take it down then. Just one baseless accusation. That's it. NO proof required! The TPP also makes it completely legal for the government to destroy anything used in the creation of the infringement, without proof, and without compensation, and any other thing that was created by the infringement work, so if that youtube video I gave the example for was used to create another video, that second video, and whatever was used to make it, can be legally destroyed also! The copyright law specifically states that only devices used commonly in criminal infringement like molds can be destroyed.  The TPP would also get rid of the exemption of copyright for non-profit educational uses completely, not require any action by the copyright holder before the government can do anything, and also allow copyright holders to penalize any and all transmissions of their copyrighted material on a PC, even legal ones, such as internet radio, legal mp3 file downloading sites like Amazon MP3/Itunes, and worse.

Now to examine the damages the people would be facing looking at the latest RIAA case:

The defendant of the latest RIAA case was forced to pay $22,500 dollars PER song downloaded when he only downloaded 30 songs illegally that were only worth $0.99 per song originally. Imagine this number multiplied by 1000 or more, It gets SCARY, Scary like in $22,500,500 per defendant for merely VIEWING a video! In a court case where the entire viewership are co-defendants of eachother (assuming the video gets 100,000 views), that adds up to $2,250,000,000,000 in damages!

If you think the lawsuit bringer would not stoop too that level, you are wrong... RIAA already made the defendant of the case pay $675,000 for 30 songs! If the persons involved show the video starts showing off the video to people on his PC, that number increases even more, lets say he shows the video to 10 friends, that number becomes $225,000,000 for that defendant!!!!

The bar, the uploader, AND youtube would probably  all be liable under TPP for ALLOWING infringement as well. The bar allowed someone to copy a song off the radio, don't think for a second the lawsuit bringer won't prosecute them.  The original poster even if he didn't put the song in the video on purpose, would STILL be held liable for allowing copies to be distributed in HIS video, even if the song was "accidentally" played in the video. Now to get to youtube.

Youtube has the reputation as the worst place on the internet, besides warez, where copyrighted material is available, and many people mistakenly believe that youtube profits off of piracy... Why? Their content ID system, which was set up to alert copyright holders to unauthorized infringers uploading their copyrighted works, allows the holders to upload samples of their copyrighted works (without proof), and gives them the option to either take down video's matching it, or to put ads in the video's. When people see ads in video's and they see infringement in the video's they think youtube are trying to profit off of this, but they aren't. The Copyright holders are, because it's THEIR choice not youtube...

Even if you think youtube's copyrighted works only amount to tv show clips and music pirated as video's you are in for a shock to what things could generate "alleged" copyright claims on youtube and what does. The following types of videos are considered infringing by someone, not necessarily the movie and music industry:

Video game commentary, Video game reviews, Video game walkthroughs, Lets plays, video's of mods for video games especially ones that include content from other games, their are tons of that,  videos of video games that have background music that just happens to be copyrighted by someone, video's showing live performances of bands or videos of bands, even if those videos are uploaded by the bands own label, behind the scenes videos of bands in the studio that play the tracks after being recorded, even though they are uploaded by the BANDS own label, advertisements for any site that hosts indie music, indie music directly uploaded to youtube by the artists themselves, indie music uploaded by an artist separately from their own indie hosting site (think reverbnation) not knowing that reverbnation/etc,  happened to copyright it,  clips from TV shows, even ones uploaded with the copyright holders permission, TV shows uploaded with permission, any video where the permission has been secured to upload it,  and any video someone claims fraudulent copyright on, without actually owning the copyright!

The sheer amount of video's where alleged infringement could occur is about 99.9% of youtube video's then. Even if some of these were not even infringing in the first place, the temporary copies found on the Hard drive of all the viewers would Guarantee that the copyright moguls and their clients would get even more money than they even deserve for this. Due to all the temporary copies being produced of copyrighted material that happens to be uploaded by people who own the rights, the amount of frivolous lawsuits resulting from this will skyrocket to the millions per years by people apparently downloading 1000 copies per video, without actually trying to do that. Simply viewing a video will get people thrown in jail and sued.  This will result in More money being given to the Copyright holders in court for something the defendant didn't even do!  This will be used to shut down youtube because of this. Imagine a megaupload trial X100 with youtube for all of this plus Temporary copies, IP address info given to the copyright holders for anyone who Dared to watch any of these videos in question. Anyone who even visited youtube and got into it would be at risk for having to pay 1000X what that defendant did due to the temporary copies!!!!

What's next after youtube??? If even ONE game related video from that list gets an alleged infringement tag, the copyright holders would get noticed. Now comes greedy gaming companies, suing major modding sites  AND lets players, people linking to those lets plays, for allowing the copyrighted infringing material to be "distributed", because of the temporary copies found on people's HDD after viewing the lets plays. You would then get them suing youtube.  I watch dozens of lets plays, because I love seeing other people playing games. It helps me get into new ones, and helps me to see good strategies in games I have already played. People like me would be targeted also. This whole thing would not end there however.  Any modding site that hosts any kind of mod for any video game that includes content from another game would then be targeted. Here's the thing. there isn't a modding site that doesn't  do this. Every single game has at least ONE mod that does this... Even modified models/graphics/sprites/textures or ones that are based or inspired would get every single Modding site in trouble. And since 99% of the modding sites are hosted by BIG gaming sites dedicated to the game they mod, those parent sites would be next.... You have 99% of the internet sites dedicated to any video game being taken down due to this!!! The following sites could be gone, Doomworld, Duke4ever, Planetquake, PlanetDeusEx, Planethalflife, TESNEXUS, ANY and All game related file hosting sites (gamefront, atomic gamer, etc),  and all other big gaming sites that happen to host mods, nevermind MODDB and other modding sites dedicated to hosting the latest mods, ALL would be targeted under this... But that is just  the microscopic tip of the iceberg.....

Streamed video in youtube is only 1% of the total streamed content online... the rest include internet radio sites, like Pandora, Snakenet internet radio and others, and ANY site that has streamed music on it. After defeating youtube and modding sites, Amazon probably will  be the the music industry's next target, for it's Amazon Mp3 download service and Amazon cloud drive, which recently got heat from the music industry for allowing people to host their own bought music on the cloud....  Amazon MP3 Allows people to buy music legally online and the price is much lower (9.99 for album vs 20+ per Phsyical CD), due to the lack of packaging and medium.  However the music industry probably won't like this because they think they don't make enough money from REAL cd's from amazon so... Next comes the Big Amzon.com take down where they demand Amazon get taken down because they are distributing "pirated" mp3 files.  Even though Amazon is not. Just because the service is "legal" does not mean the industry won't file a big lawsuit. Under TPP the chance is MUCH greater this will happen, due to the fact the ISPS have to block any site that has any allegation of infringing content on it. One Mogul saying "Amazon Mp3 is all pirated stuff" is enough to get Amazon.com shut down too. It's the only good source of music to many people, not just me, because of the fact of  the perfect selection of music and the cheap price. But that scenario only the tip of the iceberg....

There are literally Dozens of indie music hosting sites, all with streaming capabilities. A big one is soundcloud, another big one is reverbnation. I had my own metal music hosted on both for a while. Then you add in myspace music and facebook too because plugins for the later and the first allow streaming music. anyone daring to listen to any music from any of these sites is liable for copyright infringement under the TPP, due to the temporary copies being made, thousands from one song being played!!!

Next come the number 1 enemy of Piracy morons everywhere, sites like 4shared, zippyshare, mediafire, megaupload, rapidshare, which all have legit files being hosted.  Under the TPP, the ISPS's have to filter and block ANY site that has been accused of infringement, that includes ANY of the following sites, and if one of these sites haven't been accused, they will eventually, I guarantee it. This list,  which I shall constantly print on any article bashing the TPP and use as tags to get the sites owners (hopefully) involved in the attack against the TPP.

Amazon
Youtube
Facebook
Moddb
Itunes
3dgamers archive
ANY and All of the following gaming sites:
Seriously
Duke4ever
Doomworld
TESNexus
Doom3world
Fallout3nexus
Planethalflife
Func-Messgboard (look it up)
Quaddicted
Unrealsp.org
Beyondunreal.com
Payne Reactor
Planet Deus Ex
The Admirals Command Chamber
Tenfourmaps.telefragged.com
Underworldfans quake review site
Darkplaces
Zdoom.org
Gzdoom website
D2x-xl
Kmquake2
Prboomplus
Doom Legacy
DarkXL
DukePlus
Eduke32 website
Reverbnation
Purevolume
Soundcloud
4Shared
Myspace Music
Myspace
4Shared
Dropbox
FileFront/Gamefront
Atomic Gamer
Rapidshare
4Filehosting.com
Completegamer.net
Mediafire.com
Sendspace.com
Vimeo.com
Zippyshare.com
Blogspot
Wordpress

Now to help out some people who might be thinking of boycotting any corporation that is involved in the stakeholder groups supporting this pile of trash.  Here is a list of all supporting corporations, gotten from this site.  I probably won't buy from them till they change their crappy law to make it so that exact proof of infringing links is required, and that temporary copies are not counted, and that the government falsely accusing anyone of infringement gets the members involved fired, nor should you:

If Anyone reading this likes any of those sites I listed above, I highly suggest you click the take action button on this linked page by the EFF, so that your Congressman know about  the BS that's being done behind their  back by the executive branch, circumventing the Supreme court, and Congress to allow the copyright moguls  to sue 1000X as much people, for simply viewing a video! Also, make sure to visit Open The TPP, to send your message to the stakeholders who all support the TPP at the current meeting by going to  this site and writing it and sending it there.

The Trans-Pacific Partnerships Gigantic threat to the internet.

This is my first post here, and I've decided to write about what I've been writing about on that

blog for the last few days, the secret treaty called the "Trans-Pacific Partnership", which will
 basically force US to adopt copyright laws so broad and corrupt that it will make SOPA look
nice.  Under the law, the ISP's are required to A) filter all communications looking for possible
or alledged infringement, and then they are forced to hand it over to the government. The
government would then look through it looking for possible infringement. The problem with
this is that the government can then say that this site needs to be taken down to google and
other similar sites, force ISPS to filter it out, and worse. No actual proof is required that the
transmission or site is actually infringing on something, just one infringing link, or the
assurance that the site contains lots of infringing links. Also temporary copy infringement, is 
not exempt to this. Everytime someone watches a video on youtube, 1000's of temporary 
copies are created by the streaming process. The ISP would be forced to use deep packet 
inspection to find these and if one of these temporary copies is a youtube packet that is part 
of a youtube video stream that has one "alleged" infringement on it, the person watching the 
video could get arrested, and sued, because the ISP is forced to tell the "alleged" copyright 
holder. The most recent RIAA case defendant had to pay $22,500 dollars per songs for 
illegally  downloading only 30 songs, each only 99 cents each... Imagine that multiplied by 
1000 for listening  to a video on youtube where video game footage is overlayed with 
copyrighted music, because of the  1000's of temporary copies produced on the persons
HDD, all caught by the ISP. That's $22,500,000  dollars for watching a video!


Under this, there is an almost certain chance youtube will be shut down. Youtube is filled with
infringing videos uploading copyrighted music. At least a few million.  But the other video types
uploaded to youtube, such as video game lets plays, walkthroughs, etc, could all be sources of
"alleged" infringement, due to the fact that many videos showing off games are put under fair
use, which TPP seems to be made to eliminate.  But even worse,  since the government simply
has to say a site is filled with infringing links, a lot of sites will be targeted under this. Expect all
the big file sharing hosts like 4shared, mediafire, etc to be shut down first. They have tons of
copyrighted material on them, and many people keep assuming they profit off pirated files
because they allow people to buy premium accounts for more upload space, even though the
pirated files are all tiny files, all tiny portions of an archive, split into 200 parts with 200 accounts
registered to upload a file. There is no way sites like this are profiting off of files uploaded to
their free account due to the fact that ads on these sites are part of every download, no
matter how legal.

But even worse, is the threat this poses to video game modding sites. Each modding
site for a game hosts at least one mod that borrows content from the game it mods, or 
another game. Since these modding sites are many times subsites of big community sites 
like planetquake, etc, which are hosted under a bigger site called "atomic gamer", bad 
things will happen when someone decides to give them (intentionally or not)
one false accusation of infringement and the whole thing (atomic gamer, ALL the 
Planet<insert name here>.com sites would all be shut down. That's about 75% of 
the big game fan  sites right there... Even worse, 3dgamers archive, which hosts 
mirrors to the idgames and  idgames2 ftp  servers, massive ftp sites hosting millions of 
Doom and Quake Addons, levels, mods,  editors,etc,  has at least one mod that borrows 
content. Imagine if  the supporters of this treaty, abuses it to take down both atomic 
gamer  and 3dgamers archive. You lose 99% of the downloads for video games under a 
fraudulent copyright claim, because TPP does not require proof, just a claim that the site 
has copyrighted links. It's scary what could be done under the TPP treaty, to stifle websites. 
Already soundcloud.com (a host for indie music), telefragged (the predecessor to 
atomic gamer),  and filefront (a file hosting site for video game mods, patches and demos)  
found there way to a  piracy site list set up by GroupM, a big music industry advertising 
service.  So they are already  targeting  game modding sites. Neither of these sites has 
infringing material  on it, at  least to my knowledge. This still does not cover all the sites that 
could be targeted under the TPP, add in Amazon mp3 services, internet radio, and indie music 
hosting sites,  all it takes is one copyrighted upload or one alleged copyrighted upload for the 
entire site to be  taken down... Scary...