Loosening of Rule 3?

With the recent merge of Discovery+ and HBOMax and WBD erasing shows such as Infinity Train and O.K KO from not just HBOMax but all other streaming services this in effect could potentially make them lost media soon. Because of this I was wondering if it was possible for Rule 3 to be loosened a little?

 

• Manga readers that give a download option, such as ExHentai, may be mentioned along with the title of a work, but not linked to.

Rule 3 is not a moral stance but one of liability. QQ should not host any links to pirated content, because that can get the entire site taken down.

Pirated content exists. Personally, I find the example of maintaining lost media that is not available elsewhere to be an actively moral stance. Feel free to echo that stance, teach people about the existence of piracy, and provide abstract information about good sites and methods of using those sites. But don't subject QQ to any risk or liability with direct links to torrents etc.

The rule is extremely unlikely to be loosened, and is currently loose enough for our purposes.

 

For those curious why other websites can get away with hyperlinking to copyrighted material, even directly (like by embedding it or iframing it), this hinges on the DMCA Safe Harbor protections against secondary liability.

Hyperlinking to infringing content can never cause direct liability as you are not the one hosting the content on your server.

Secondary infringement involves inducing demand for known infringing content. As long as it is a user that posts the link, the platform not knowing that specific content is specifically copyright infringing (say, by previously receiving a notice from the copyright holder that the material is infringing), then there are no consequences (so this does mean the website has to moderate or blacklist links it’s had DMCA takedown requests for before).

Also, there are two untried defenses to linking to copyright infringing material being hosted elsewhere while not causing Secondary Liability. One, which is the more questionable of the two, is to post a broken link, such that clicking it does not send you to the correct location, like replacing the “.com” portion with “.###” and thus avoid the part of Secondary Liability where you were introducing the illegal content to a new audience, and this defense should work if you don’t tell anyone how to fix the link. A stronger version of this which is undoubtedly legal (for other reasons) is posting a unique ID related to another website’s contents (especially without referencing the site), like the ID found in YouTube videos, for example, dQw4w9WgXcQ that some of you might recognize as (the official) Never Gonna Give You Up. Or when people ask for “the numbers” for a specific hentai site.

The second defense, this one is considered probable to work, but also hasn’t been tried: don’t tell anyone to click on the link, don’t ask them to, just post it, thus you are not “inducing” demand, you are simply referencing it.

The first defense completely immunized the platform, while the second defense requires removing the link if they receive a DMCA or are otherwise notified by the copyright holder that the link point to copyrighted infringing material.

So the most defensible way to do this is to post the link as plain text (that needs to be copy-pasted, not clicked), without encouraging anyone to visit the link, preferably incomplete or with some mangling that requires fixing. Again, linking a unique ID without any domain information is considering unquestionably legal in the US.

It’s considered questionable and thus very confusing if looking for advice whether linking to the home page of a “clearly infringing” website like torrent sites or those MP3 linking sites is illegal: it’s not illegal (questionable if the home page is location of the copyright infringing material, which is one of the untried issues).

You can see how it is difficult for QQ to carve out rules to allow for this, especially as getting DMCA safe harbor relief from secondary liability requires following the whole DMCA service provider rigamarole. Linking to manga sites is risky if proper steps aren’t taken, and those take a lot of effort. For a platform that thrives because of a minimal need for moderation and straightforward rules, this is the ideal spot to draw the line: blacklist domains that the platform has reason to suspect definitely hosts infringing material, and would only be linked to in order to access infringing material. Then deep links (a specific link to material on another site) to images otherwise won’t cause secondary liability for the platform.