Reddit’s Piracy Subreddit Is Purging a Decade of Posts (2024)

Since around 2009, Reddit’s /r/piracy subreddit has been a place for people dedicated to downloading media for free to trade information, methods, and in some cases direct links to copyrighted material. Since its inception, the subreddit has grown to more than 360,000 subscribers.

Now, 10 years of posting history is going up in smoke as the moderation team purges any posts older than six months in the face of an overwhelming number of claims from rights holders. The process is slow, and two weeks on since the purge started there are still posts from nine years ago.

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According a post by /r/piracy mod “dysgraphical,” Reddit’s legal team reached out on March 14 to tell the subreddit’s mods to clean up their act or risk the subreddit being banned.

“This is our formal warning about repeat infringement in this community,” Reddit said, according to /r/piracy’s mods. “Over the past months we’ve had to remove material from the community in response to copyright notices 74 times. That’s an unusually high number taking into account the community’s size.”

Though /r/piracy is a place to discuss piracy generally, the mods strive to keep the community from actually breaking copyright law. One of the subreddit’s cardinal rules is not to link to copyrighted material. The /r/piracy mods claim they were never contacted by Reddit previously.

“Reddit Legal states that they have acted 74 times on these copyright notices through removals, but it is the first time we have been officially contacted regarding any infringement,” dysgraphical said in a post about the notice.

According to the /r/piracy mods, Reddit sent them a spreadsheet listing every copyright claim it has acted on so far in 2019—38 so far.

According to dysgraphical, who posted the spreadsheet to Reddit, some of the claims covered activities that fell short of actually posting links to copyrighted material, including asking if a streaming site was down and instructing others on how to install music software (without links to the software itself).

“Reddit does not bother to sort through their DMCA notices and complies immediately whether the content is infringing or not,” dysgraphical said. “Sharing a streaming site URL is considered copyright infringement, asking if a streaming site is down is considered copyright infringement, sharing guides on installing programs and not providing links is considered copyright infringement.”

Ethan Jacobs, an intellectual property lawyer with Holland Law LLP in San Francisco, said he’s not shocked by Reddit’s reported actions. Compliance is better than taking up a legal fight against a corporation like Warner Bros.

“I’m not surprised Reddit isn’t engaging in arguments about what is or is not really copyright infringement,” he said. Jacobs noted that DMCA notices give websites such as Reddit a way to avoid harsher legal measures. “DMCA acts as a liability safe harbor for websites that host user-uploaded materials. It isn’t intended to allow websites to stand up for users’ ability to post materials, and doing that could risk their safe harbor.”

Spokespeople for Reddit and the moderators of /r/piracy were not immediately available for comment, but we will update this post if we hear back.

Read More: Radical Leftists Built Their Own Reddit After It Banned Them

The sheer volume of such copyright complaints would make it difficult for the /r/piracy moderators to fight them all, dysgraphical explained. For example, according to dysgraphical, 20 takedown complaints were filed on comments in a 2016 thread.

“Copyright holders can scour 2+ year-old threads and file infringement on every single comment,” he said. “This is especially significant because it means that there is no way for us to combat these frivolous infringements. Any copyright holder that wishes to file a notice can dig deep enough and find anything that’s slipped in between the cracks and Reddit will gladly comply.”

According to moderator “dbzer0,” scrubbing /r/piracy’s ten year history of posts for anything possibly infringing wouldn’t be feasible. “As you might imagine, this is impossible for the volunteer mods, and probably impossible for Reddit staff themselves,” dbzer0 said in a post.

The mods felt there was only one viable option—a mass deletion of everything older than six months or lose the subreddit.The mods put it to a vote and the community overwhelmingly voted in favor of the mass deletion.

Now ten years of posts from the community will be gone from the subreddit. In late March, the mods launched a script to purge the subreddit’s old posts. At the time, the mods said it might take weeks for the code to finish doing its job.

Despite the dramatic move, there’s no guarantee that the subreddit will be out of rights holders’ crosshairs. And so a backup plan was put in place.

Before the purge began, the community archived the subreddit’s history and moved it to a GitHub, so the archive will live on, just not on Reddit. The subreddit also has a “fallback forum,” listed on the sidebar, that’s hosted on raddle.me, a Reddit-like site with explicitly anarchist politics.

“Mark my words when the new [ Game of Thrones] episodes get leaked here and the new Avengers movie gets released here, it’s over,” Redditor “Amaurotica” said.

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Reddit’s Piracy Subreddit Is Purging a Decade of Posts (2024)

FAQs

Reddit’s Piracy Subreddit Is Purging a Decade of Posts? ›

The mods felt there was only one viable option—a mass deletion of everything older than six months or lose the subreddit. The mods put it to a vote and the community overwhelmingly voted in favor of the mass deletion. Now ten years of posts from the community will be gone from the subreddit.

Why is Reddit deleting subreddits? ›

Reddit: subreddit removal reasons H2 2023

In the second half of 2023, the most common reason for subreddit removal was spam, with 456,849 subreddits being removed and banned for this reason. Additionally, over 169 thousand communities were taken down by Reddit admins due to a lack of active moderation.

Is piracy allowed in Reddit? ›

On pretty much every subreddit, you will likely get your comments deleted for mentioning piracy and apparently whole subreddits have been banned for it. Despite this, r/Piracy, which has over a million members and a dedicated wiki for links to pirating sites, is allowed to remain up without any action from the admins.

Why are subreddits getting banned? ›

Eventually, Reddit administrators instituted usage rules to allow for the banning of groups and members who stole or exposed personal information/images or promoted illegal activity, violence, shaming, racial or gender hatred, harassment, or extremist speech.

Are Reddit posts truly deleted? ›

It can either (a) actually get deleted or (b) get un-flagged by an admin, which means it won't be deleted. If a Reddit admin reinstates a deleted post, it could continue to show up as deleted on your profile but be searchable via a web browser, particularly if the user isn't logged in to Reddit.

Why are so many posts being removed from Reddit? ›

Moderators remove posts from feeds for a variety of reasons, including keeping communities safe, civil, and true to their purpose. This rule is in place to minimize spamming.

Does Reddit delete inactive subs? ›

When subreddits have had no activity, we periodically remove them to make space for new communities. For more information about what this means please visit our r/ModNews post. Subreddits that you moderate that qualify for dormant removal include: mystyrnile.

Did Reddit get rid of chats? ›

Reddit has confirmed reports from users that it has removed all chats and messages from before 2023. If you have cherished memories of engaging in conversations with friends on Reddit, you may want to double-check your archives.

Why Reddit is banning my account? ›

Banning your account from Reddit is an action taken by Reddit to enforce our sitewide rules. If your account has been temporarily or permanently banned from Reddit for violating our rules, you'll have a message in your inbox letting you know how you violated our rules, what actions were taken, and how to appeal.

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