GIF Site Gfycat Announces Mass Deletions, Threatens Archive Team With Lawsuit (boingboing.net) 21
Gfycat is threatening to sue Archive Team for archiving the site's old, anonymously-posted images that are marked for deletion. Gfycat's CEO, Dan McEleney, says archiving the memes it hosts is a "denial of service attack" and demands compensation. From a report: The fallout is ongoing on Twitter, with users of the site panicking about their old content and the company asking for (and being refused) private negotiations with Internet Archive, which [Archive Team founder Jason Scott] points out is not the same entity as the legally-threatened Archive Team.
Monetising? (Score:5, Insightful)
So, I assuming they have a new plan to monetise the content people have given them for free, and that therefore having all that free content hanging around gets in their way.
Perhaps we should cry them a river.
Oh, wait a minute, no..
And, denial of service? Denial of bait and switch business model is not a denial of service..
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Oh, and just to reply to myself, I know they are trying to claim the DoS was due to the mass downloading of the content (not the making available..) their other communications make it clear what their actual motivation is.
It is quite normal when about to remove PUBLIC content to give people a warning and expect it to get archived away - they just seem to have assumed the obvious thing would not happen.
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The DoS they're complaining about is too many hits on their servers due to Archive Team's attempt to crawl the site.
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probably a few others are crawling the site too though.
look, they don't want them archived off site. that just it.
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Technically you are right - and a lot of the violations may have been done by the submitters.
True original content is rare and not everyone that posts it expects to have to care about copyright concerns about a picture of a cat doing cat things. But if someone like Gfycat now tries to monetize from it then it could be opening a can of worms since if what ended up there wasn't uploaded by the copyright holder then Gfycat can't really expect that you gave away your copyright, it was someone else that gave it
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If fair use was not a thing, then you would have a point..
Most of these gifs are maybe a second long, it would be quite hard to claim they didnt fall under fair use, or that they represented any significant violation of the original.
Of course you would still have endless fun actually defending that if a copyright holder went after you... but thats how the legal system works now.
Re: Monetising? (Score:2)
That is not how fair use works in the US.
Archive Team? (Score:2)
Is this a known entity? Or was this submission to Slashdot the first time we've heard from them?
I certainly don't know them, but that doesn't necessarily mean anything. Plus I must admit that, in my mind, anything that reduces the number of animated GIFs out in the wild is a good thing.
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They are a known group, yes.
Often known as the group most people confuse with the Internet Archive.
They have been mentioned in slashdot articles of the past here and there, but infrequently enough to be easily missed.
They did a similar thing when tumblr went to delete all the NSFW groups and imagery, they did a massive archive of geocities before the site was shuttered, and I think they were the ones helping to archive google+ postings or something.
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I've mostly noticed them when their bot aggressively crawls forums. It can be like a DDOS.
Fuck gfycat (Score:1)
They only exist because of other people's content
Re: Fuck gfycat (Score:2)
Kind of like slashdot.
Basically (Score:5, Insightful)
Got it.
Denial of imbecility? (Score:4)
Re:Denial of imbecility? (Score:4, Interesting)
Have you ever had Archive Team try archiving your site? Their crawler is like a DDOS. When it hits a PHPBB site, it will fetch every single possible starting post and visible post count for every thread, and lots of other weird combinations. I'm not entirely surprised it can take down a site.
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