Okay, so if I haven't said it before (read: I have, multiple times) let me say this one more time.
This isn't about what we want. It's about what we feel we need.
If I had my way, and it were my site, I'd let the status quo stand. I'd respond to any take-down notices I got and would very strongly crack down on people straight-up hacking stuff. That's me though. I'm anti-capitalist and I think this whole copyright business does get a bit absurd.
So let that dissuade you from thinking there's some sort of "sinister motive" at work here. Would love to see what sort of idea you have on that, BTW. Money where your mouth is, and all that? The only thing being put forward here is the notion that we don't want to potentially get Richard and Sandor in trouble, even if that likelihood is very small and even if it probably won't be enormous trouble. And yes, even if it just means that when it comes, it'll show up in the form of a take-down notice with no further repercussions. We are not making sweeping changes to anything under the auspices of their nonexistent guidance. We are not justifying something really mean because we want to, while passing it off on two people who aren't here to defend themselves. So let's stop that train right there, shall we?
This is, as Liam pointed out, a rule you agreed to whenever you signed up, whether that was last year, last night or some time last decade. The rule was there, it just wasn't enforced. Now we're going to try with much more diligence to enforce it.
Point, by the way: we're human, and we won't catch everything. We'll try hard to make sure things get scrubbed to ensure safety, but a failure to achieve 100% efficiency is not hypocritical, it's merely evidence that we're human. Tell you what though. I'm going to call out the whole community here. There are only a few of us moderator/administrator types, and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of users overall. Since this will be the stance going forward, and since thousands of eyes are better than a dozen or so, metaphorically speaking, perhaps you'd care to help the community instead of just sitting back, casting judgment or waiting for a proverbial axe to fall? Just sayin'.
I don't think we need any fear-mongering either, thanks kindly. We are not going to censor opinions, or discussion of your favourite books/movies/TV shows/whatever else. We are not going to ban you if you mention the audio vault or Game of Thrones or the Harry Potter series you happened to torrent six years ago. We are simply not going to provide links to stuff that could get the site in trouble. It's really no more or less simple than that.
The thing which sparked the discussion of this issue on list, by the way, ultimately came down to a point where it is awfully hard to justify a sometimes-on sometimes-off stance. Do you really want a rule 3 that is seven pages long? Because that's probably what it would take. And who gets to decide where to draw the line? Is Crazy Party okay because it's free and because it's not too easy to take the sounds/music out of it, or is it bad because it uses a ton of sounds from content in a way not intended by the creators of that content? What about audio described movies, especially old ones that are otherwise hard to get? Music? Books not available on Audible? All sorts of stuff. Where do you draw the line? We can't go around grandfathering x and y, while outlawing several others, and just pretending seventy-seven cases don't exist so we don't have to deal with them. Put bluntly, this sort of discussion has essentially been the elephant in the living room that no one's done anything about because we didn't know how. Now that we've decided how to do it, many of you are freaking out. And to some extent, I get it. You're afraid it's a slippery slope. It's not. You're afraid that the forum is going to become a whole lot less welcoming. It's not. We just decided it was better on the whole, both ethically and legally, to take a stand that didn't involve a hundred and forty-three arbitrary sub-clauses based on personal bias. It was, in essence, either all or nothing. And nothing is safer. Nothing is the better option.
Check out my Manamon text walkthrough at the following link:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/z8ls3rc3f4mkb … n.txt?dl=1