- cross-posted to:
- techtakes@awful.systems
- technology
And perhaps sidestepping its own policy in the process.
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And another reason not to use Discord.
Well, the next best option would be paying for hosting in a 3rd world country who doesn’t give a shit about international copyright laws. Not an easy task, but hosting your own Discord like platform is probably the absolute best you can do if you’re running an operation like making an emulator while the copyright bandits cry foul.
Sure, hosting your own platform or using a decentralized solution would prevent this bullshit, but the whole situation is worse than just them deleting it. The whole issue is that no Discord terms of service were violated here. So they went against their own terms with this move, which means anyone is subject to the same actions even if they are complying with the terms of service.
Well yeah. Terms of service don’t exist for the benefit of the users. If the company doesn’t like what you are doing, nothing stops them from banning you, there’s no reason to expect them to try to be fair about it. This is why these sites/apps having a dominant position is such a problem.
Terms of service is actually a two party agreement. It’s very weak on the consumer side due to capitalism, but it’s technically enforceable. Hence, all the class action lawsuits happens when company side breaks that agreement. They need to show that you broke terms of service to justify a ban. Prior to both sides agreeing, they can refuse to allow you to use the service for any reason. People seems to conflate these two things.
If companies terms of service said “we can do whatever we want whenever we want, and we don’t have to promise any service, and you have no rights” nobody would sign those terms.
I don’t buy it. If you have examples of someone successfully suing to be unbanned because the ban was beyond the terms of service I’ll be convinced but I don’t think that’s ever happened or would ever happen because I don’t think terms of service waive any rights to deny access to servers the company owns, especially when it’s free to begin with.
From the article:
At the end of the day, platforms like Discord have no obligation to host anything they don’t want to host, as we discussed back when GitLab did something similar by deplatforming Suyu’s code.
“Their first email was that my account has broken the TOS, with no additional information.” He claims Sudachi wasn’t doing anything infringing. Later, he was told it vaguely had something to do with intellectual property but says Discord still hasn’t given him any details.
The bans I’ve gotten myself are always like this when it’s a big company. No real explanation given, no recourse possible, I don’t expect a lawyer would tell me differently. IMO the only solution is to stop focusing on the “rules” they have written entirely for their own benefit and start using systems that are more decentralized in terms of who is actually in control.