Adam y.

EDIT: 11/27/2018 Please check the updates at the bottom.
OLD TITLE: Worst business decision ever since Adobe's move to creative cloud subscription only.
OLD review:
Photobucket, more like photof#cket.
What would you feel if you make a blog, a website or any other post, and then years later, found out that the (old) images were replaced with a message demanding you to upgrade your account to a paid subscription.
Images across the internet using Photobucket are now WREAKED, asking users to pay money to have them hosted (not a one-time fee, a periodic $400/year plan). It's a huge insult that they WOULD DECIDE to have this subscription at the most expensive of all their subscriptions. I am so disappointed to see this forum post of arts just got wiped out:
https://bbs.saraba1st.com/2b/thread-*******-2-1.html.

EDIT
Hotlinks aren't the only ones destroyed, viewing it directly, downloading or otherwise accessing it (even from their own site) on some images SOMETIMES NO LONGER WORKS (the "please upgrade your account" image instead of the image intended). That is a mess. This could be one of the biggest internet DISASTER ever. It's like they're censoring them for ransom. More like hosting images disabled, not just 3rd party.
Many people said they did this because their income are short due to users using adblockers on their site, you know why? Its because your site is heavily infested by ads. At least some news sites, deviantart and wikia step it up on keeping their ads clean. Nobody wants ads that have un-close-able, website access/usability-disabling, redirecting, opening in a new tab, scam hosting, fake close buttons, spawning a separate browser window as pop-ups (including pop-unders), banners/boxes WITHIN the website filling the screen, installing malware, noisy auto-plays that refuses to mute, any browsing-obstructive content placed on a webpage and any other what google describes them as "abusive experience". I've experienced mediafire and rayfile doing this cr@p with clicking on the (real) download button. Viewing it on mobile is EVEN WORSE, just run away.
This company turned to sh! T the way imageshack (better to be called imageshat) did. They had the nerve to turn their backs to say "no, it's no longer free" and prevent hosting images. What's worse is that they don't give enough warning to all its users that there is a change in terms of service.
The first time I saw this was on smwcentral, and it look god awful: http://smwc.me/*******
I hope this practice does not spread to multiple companies that host images like cancer, if any of them were to act this way, then there is no way to host your images permanently, like an avocado thats opened. Better to use google drive and link without hotlinking.
If you're an active user who wanted to fix your post, you have a FIELD DAY of fixing thousands of images across the internet you posted. If you're inactive, its gone forever. They could've make only images uploaded after that point be blocked, but they decided to screw it all.
EDIT: give a shout to Michel van Heijster for making a script that makes fixing your images WAY easier, download here: https://bitbucket.org/michelvh/photobucketscraper. Not sure if this is gunna work with if the image view on photobucket got replaced.
Thank god someone was smart enough to help others with this problem.
EDIT2: There is an browser add-on that circumvent this "hotlink protection" called "photobucket hotlink fix": https://github.com/Ryan-Myers/photobucket-embed-fix. What I want you to do is use that extension to enable viewing images, then download them ("save as"). It should download the actual image. Now reupload that image to another site (that does not do sh! T like photobucket did) and post a message stating that you backed up the image as intention to help visitors reading it.

11/27/2018 update: They have improved their business models and no longer block images anymore but rather watermarked them on outside sites. Now lets hope they continue to grow. The only sad problem now is due to the nature of how hotlink detection works, web archives cannot archive them as the hot inked content can read your URL. But you can download their originals.

There is no such things as sucessful automated filters. False positives and negatives are bound to happen. Robots only know what they programmed to do, they don't understand context, and are not self-aware.

You probably have herd about the European Union's article 13 that forces major websites to employ an automated copyright filter to prevent people from uploading infringing material to websites. Youtube have done a similar thing before this happened but merely notifies copyright holders instead of proactively taking down what's potentially legal content. And yes automated takedown themselves also exist, ToppleTrack went haywire due to a bug.

While telling if something is copyright infringement is easier for most cases, due to the fact that it compares with a databases that copyright holders are welcomed to prohibit unauthorized distributions there (via matching-based data hashes), it is much harder to try to tell if something is pornographic or not, due to a sheer number of ways to represent inappropriate stuff and this isn't matching base, so it doesn't compare with anything.

The result: Tumblr ends up flagging TONS of posts that have nothing to do with "Adult Content", images of dragons, dogs, and even abstract art with no "characters" in it (here: http://dailyrothko.tumblr.com/post/*******506/not-to-pile-on-here-but-this-doesnt-look-exactly) ends up in the wrong. You really can't trust robo-police here.

Is it enough that most websites require you to be at a certain age to even create an account. Why is it that most places, like apple's (the same company who made proprietary closed-platform in which they can decide what app can run on their devices) app store forbid porn altogether (regardless of the age of the viewer). This is overzealous censorship. We all know that parents are smart enough to prevent their kids from seeing such stuff on the Internet, there are parental controls at almost every services and systems (game consoles, google's safesearch, etc.).

Tumblr you should've done these things:
-Do something similar to how art sites censor for minors. No joke, if you are going to make changes to your policy, at least you would've done is to make existing post compatible with future changes. Something like a checkbox to notify the system to only display works towards older audiences.
-You should've made a no-porn policy when you were creating the website. But you decided to welcome them and then brake your promise.

Congratulations: you've lost a lot of your users. And also, screw apple, companies and other services who pressured tumblr to a censorship blogging place. It's another photobucket incident that images are disappearing (ESPICALLY for inactive users, which can be deleted forever).

Just read this article: https://torrentfreak.com/nintendo-conducted-invasive-surveillance-operation-against-homebrew-hacker-*******/

On top of the attack against abandonwares, fan games, and even homebrew people out there, it was revealed they have went from anti-piracy to anti-privacy what it was revealed that leakers have shown that Nintendo were going intrusive on their surveillance against an individual in 2013. They're on the very border of becoming flightsimlabs (2018 when they pulled the stunt on acting like vigilantes of a password-stealing tool), and the move that Take2 and 2K sent goons to someone's house relating to that borderlands 3 incident: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ip2nm503Tm0

That Smash melee is really the straw that broke the camel's back, I would say thank you to the leakers for revealing Nintendo's dark secrets. The secret formula that is filled with poison about the company itself is now exposed.

-This organization is a draconian copyright supporter: SOPA supporter, Destroying abandonware, and tries to protest many of the important exemptions of the DMCA about circumventing DRM.

-Supporter of Microtransactions. Not only they are trying to justify loot boxes in video games to not be government-regulated, according to a torrentfreak article: https://torrentfreak.com/esa-reports-pirate-bay-rom-sites-and-cheaters-to-the-us-govt-*******/ they have the UTTER NERVE to enforce against cheating to bypass microtransactions, (different from how EPIC and T2's reasoning to sue cheaters, since that is for multiplayer):

"In this section of its report, the ESA highlights threats to "free-to-play" games that generate revenue from micro-transactions, advertising, and subscriptions. Unauthorized third-party private' servers allow users to play such games, bypassing the original revenue model and stopping publishers from monetizing their content."

Microtransactions in video games are often designed to exploit players and make the game worse on purpose and selling off the in-game items to improve the experience in the process. See this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xNjI03CGkb4 they rely on "creating a problem and selling the solution", For example, a "free-to-wait" mechanic in mobile games (forcing you to wait or pay up), grind walls in $60 games (make you do repetitive tedious tasks like killing enemies if you choose not to pay up). Its like going to a grocery store, to find that the floors are dirty, items on shelves not organized, on purpose and to have those fixed, you, the consumer have to pay extra.

If games are too expensive, they should've sell the game at a higher base price and not rely on "player's choice" on secondary purchases. These game companies rely on, "whales" people willing to spend a lot of money on a game. There are people out there with disabilities, addics and other issues that makes them susceptible to such business practices. News articles broke out about kids spending their parent's bank accounts and others going broke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S-DGTBZU14.

This sounds frighting enough, until news broke out around the beginning of August 2019 that they doxxed 2000s of people's personal information at the E3, including home addresses, phone numbers, and full names out into the public that is the internet. It's as if they are trying to compete with Facebook, Equfax, and Capitol One to see who is the worse in trying to protect individual's information. Many of these 2000s are game journalists and even ones who make youtube videos criticizing the game industry.

You know that such information shouldn't be out in the public, because there are malicious people who disagree with others, and would rather stalk and attack them physically. They've been swatting, and having your home address is enough for them to target you. Therefore, the ESA's mishandling of this put many people who signed into the E3 in danger.

According to a Wikipedia Article regarding the AACS Key controversy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

They removed the link to "Digg-it" on their blog because:

"Until the Digg community shows as much fervor in attacking intellectual piracy as attacking the companies that are legitimately defending their property, well, we do not want to be promoting the site by using the "Digg It" feature."

Guess what, it isn't a crime to have people posting "infringing" decryption keys on website when the webowner AT LEAST tried to remove such content. Not to mention, how is content (which is often digital content such as software) on a DVD used as piracy even related to this company who specializes manufacturing? WHAT THE HECK?!?

Also, this company is a SOPA supporter, so this company is not worth supporting then. F#ck off.

Okay, according to some Japanese articles, they oppose the making and distribution midi songs of a copyrighted song. To me, that's unnecessary, because it is possible to make derivative works even by making songs with your voice, and also can teach some people how music patterns work. Its like anti-fan music. A midi file is like a source code of a software, but without illegally hurting businesses (legitimate use).

If that isn't enough, they wanted to collect copyright fees on schools too. Therefore rendering schools more expensive. It's already bad enough that textbooks with a passcode for online version REQUIRES you to pay money to register this key should you rent the textbook (therefore, violating the first sale doctrine).

Would you like to use a file hosting service that have a tendency of deleting your files? Then this is for you.

Across the Internet just before the approximate year 2012 or so, almost ALL links to dropbox files suddenly breaks and leads to error 404. This is not because the user purposely deleted them. This can be proven here:
https://smwc.me/******* (if it was deleted on purpose, it would've state the reason)

This is a disgrace, almost as bad as the recent photobucket disaster when they changed their TOS to require $399/year to display images off-site. Again, if the user of Dropbox is inactive, there is no way for that to be fixed unless someone else has a backup available. Use google drive instead.

How can they do this? A site designed for backup and sharing your files (legally), now trashed and gone for good.

EDIT: it happened on March 15,2017. They decided to remove public links and never admitted the reason why.

My review was late, but they use to be great in the past until they wanted more money out of a consumer's wallet. Give big thanks to alternative software that don't do this cr@p.

Basically on May 5,2013 Adobe decided to make their software only available as "software as a service" rather than selling it as a product from a store. This means you don't actually own it, but renting it. The only good thing I can say about this is that it cost $10 at the cheapest, but as everyone knows, monthly payments will eventually be more expensive than just what you're buying if they were to allow it.

Imagine if you can only rent laptop and not buy it, that would be terrible.

Here are two major issues with the software and the company:
1) Crippleware: Your video gets marred by a watermark that is almost completely opaque and takes up half the screen. Combine with being a software as a service (monthly payments) rather than buying for a 1-time fee like most other software across the internet makes it even worse. You have to subscribe for this if you want good videos, which means that they are greedy, much like adobe when they went subscription-only. Thank god there ARE video editing software that don't have sh! Tty watermarks on it, like Videomeld.

2) The company censors reviews saying about its watermarks, look at this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=38MbqrkLplk&t=0s what you see is a video taken down by obviously "Filmora Video Editor". This violates free speech and fair use. They want people to not know what that thing is on their video and get the software to shake down on users.

What they could've done is either make the watermark more transperent or smaller, stop with the false DMCA abuse, and actually disclose to the consumers the full information about the crippleware. (like " make sure you make a backup" or something)

... Thought it would be a good idea to extend the attacks towards people that don't pirate at all.

"How do I stop this infection? How about use a nuclear bomb to kill everything in sight?"

They are NOTORIOUS for trying to create a handful of new copyright enforcement tools (more specifically, laws, crappy DRM) which ALL of them have dangerous side effects that nobody ever wants besides any copyright maximalist who think its a good idea to add more restrictions, enforcement, and even monitoring to users. From annoying FBI warning screens (in this modern age, you cannot skip) to requiring certain devices they don't own to have DRM on it (such as television flags), this organization has it all:

*SOPA (and its clones, including PIPA) supporter. In a nutshell, they wanted to make sites punished more easily just because it has infringing content, rather than a notification before a takedown if the site owner doesn't obey when it is in fact infringement. This goes without saying that safe harbor is bypassed should this bill passed into law. When I mean sites being punished, I mean that any copyright holder can simply send a notification to payment network providers, advertising services and any other groups to stop supporting the site that is flagged for infringement, WITHOUT ANY PROOF. This comes before the victim of the attack have to proof that they're not supporting piracy. So the damage to the site is already done. Along with Viacom (yes, another copyright maximalist who f*cked youtube along with false takedown to any reviewers like they are being above the copyright law) and others who previously try to pass the COICA bill, they have the NERVE to try again on a similar law enforcement tools all over again. If you fail to succeed, DON'T try try again. They wait no time to attack. Treating online service providers or anything else that is abusable for piracy like slaves is egregious.

-Of course, members of the MPAA was Universal Pictures and Walt Disney Company, who got into a fight with sony (Not sony pictures, just sony) for releasing a video tape titled "Betamax" in 1984. Find more on "Sony Corp. of America v. Universal City Studios, Inc." and thank god that Sony didn't lose the battle. They are afraid that if a tool that is often used for piracy, they will try to take it down for liability just because it enabled them to do so. This is an example they trying to be against fair use.

They're slogan "don't talk and don't record" (can't remember exactly) pretty much tells me that the first two words is censorship, for the Internet under the name of copyright enforcement. This organization represents the crumbling, corrupted, corrosive form of copyright. They hated safe harbors the same way they hated piracy, up to where people would like to use content in creative ways that doesn't harm a copyright holder's revenue. This is the complete opposite of what copyright intended to do: "To promote prosperity, creativity, entrepreneurship, and innovation by combating the theft of U.S. property, and for other purposes." More like "To promote dictatorship, monopoly, and relying on extremism by combating freedom of speech".

This train wants to crash into other youtubers for containing songs even if played in the background. This is equivalent to celebrity fights, He is basically Jessica Price (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9q50oy4-UJM) in terms of passive-agressive and giving the public the middle finger.

I'm not blaming bandcamp at all, bandcamp is good. I'm looking at an horrendous, pugnacious, death threatening, perjuy-est musical artist named Alex Tomas Mauer. Blame part of it on youtube for allowing this.

This user is chiptune music maker who made music for Star Mazarr DSP, River City Underground, and many others. According to SidAlpha on youtube, this user decided to go to war with youtube containing gameplay of video games containing any of his music from the game itself, regardless how small it contains its (transgender user) music, reflecting back on Lenz v. Universal on a video about a baby dancing to a Prince's song. It saddens me the most that youtube's DMCA system does not require proof of infringement, therefore, all you have to do is fill out an application and thats it. I'm pretty sure that the agreement for musical artist to have their musics in video games states that you cannot take down game footage of any kind for any reason.

To top it all off, before the user closes its site, it decided to have the cost of the vaganox to be $1000 to buy it. That's criminal. This user had the nerve to anger its fans to not buy its stuff again.

Combine that behavior with even hitting a police in one of the documents, this user is never going to be a composer ever again for a company.

What this user could've done is have somebody help him out when signing in agreements, many people says this user have mental issues, and that to understand how the offical copyright ststem works. She cannot control how copyright works, she can copyright hisworks but not have more restrictions past the limitations and exceptions of it.

I think his works diserved to be pirated

When I was downloading a file off from this site, Avira sounded the alarm and shows me a bunch of PUP (potentially unwanted programs - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potentially_unwanted_program)

In case if you don't know, PUPs are software, potentially malware, that is bundled with the disired software you want to download. I would only tolerate ads if it is on a webpage and is contained within a browser tab. Running ads outside my browser is a major no-no.

This company represents ALL anti-consumer and anti-users business practices AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE. They don't want happy consumers, they want money, they want china-styled internet, they want copyright to have more power for liability. They say f*ck you for cancelling their service, and also mail you a bad name.

The actual problems are:
-Crippled internet:
--Supported the unholy SOPA bill. SOPA stands for "Stop Online Piracy Act", one of the worst copyright bill that luckily didn't pass. It basically gives big corporations power to demand ISP to block sites regardless if legal or not.

--Anti-net neutrality. If you thought web filtering was bad, how about the ISP's turn to do the blocking? They are basically trying to completely block sites that they don't want. Even if you take that out, they wanted to slow certain loading sites to force you to pay more, that's greedy and much worse than software companies using crippleware to encourage users to pay the full version (such as a watermark on video editing programs). I know they are trying to prevent piracy, but those sites are not always used for that reason, some of them are used legally, such as a backup, review, etc.

-Lawsuits. I can't count how many they have, but they even violate a law that enforces net neutrality: Hart v. Comcast Corp. (and also false advertising), overcharging users, etc.

-HORRABLE CUSTOMER SERVICE:
--changing customers' name to a bad name, like Ricardo Brown changed to a curse word.
--The bomb that exploded on "Hurricane Ike", basically comcast didn't care if disasters like this happens, you are still required to return their equipment of renting.
--Trying to terminate the service is also bad, just look at other reviews. There are too many issues.
-Overbilling. I mean really.

And more. This company features every possible thing they did that consumer hates

If you ignore all the good songs made or published by this person, you'll find something disturbing about this person. He is one of the people that wanted the US to have draconican copyright laws much like the MPA (previously the MPAA) and the RIAA. He's an arrogant temperament man- oops I mean kid (because he acts like a spoiled kid, despite his age is 72! He was born in 1947 for f*cks sake! So he hasn't man up throughout 72 years) over even small uses of copyrighted works. Attacking fair uses of works and acting babyish over that he "owns" everything he makes even ones that were made before he made it.

Just look at this: https://www.techdirt.com/blog/?tag=don+henley and you'll see he is attacking artists, people using words that is used in the common language BEFORE any of his lyrics were created

The most recent article (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/*******/*******612/midst-pandemic-widespread-unrest-senate-republicans-think-time-to-use-copyright-to-make-richest-musicians-richer.shtml as of now) made this excuse:

[Not because I don't like parodies or satires of my work. But it's simply a violation of U.S. copyright law.]

Which means he wanted to nuke stuff on the internet for no other reason just to be a copyright police without any legitimate reason.

Nobody wishing to create a website should accept a zero-tolerance DMCA policy by a host that would expect websites to be perfect at preventing copyright infringement and being expected to voluntary to remove them without a DMCA notice. Any website that allows posting can be abused for piracy, and owners cannot monitor all files at once to make sure they are compliant with the law (especially if there are tons of users). A tolerance this low means this company deserves to go bankrupt or change their policy for forcing web owners to do something impossible.

According to this techdirt article "Adland Shuts Down After Web Host Complies With Bull$h! T DMCA Notice", Adland had to shut down due to a response of this server host when receiving a DMCA notice from Bridgestone Tires. Instead of locking up the site and unlocking once the DMCA notices are followed, they would rather perma-ban this site off their network, stating they must migrate to a new server within 24 hours. This is just *ONE* DMCA notice, and this host is sensitive to this.

Screw this "self-copyright-enforcement" on how they deal this "repeat-infringer policy"- oh wait, it isn't a repeat policy, its a zero-tolerance.

This is like instead of getting 3 copyright strikes on youtube to get you banned, just getting ONE now gets you banned.

Just to warn you, not all DMCA notices are true, as they can be sent in error, in an attempt to censor, and rarely, to extort people.

This is one of the "above the law" "voluntary" enforcement actions by companies thinking that liability and pressure should be increased in their own hands:
-Google banning "kodi" from the search term because it was "associated with piracy". Kodi, itself is completely legal. Funny that so far to now, Youtube have tons of videos on getting Kodi addons that facilitate piracy, and not many are taken down by youtube.
-ProFreeHost bans any and all "torrent" files even when they are not infringing copyright.

These companies are overly-chilled (chilling effect).

Imagine in real life you're going to a store. Suddenly you get kicked out because you have these that are prohibited:
-Wearing clothing that have pockets.
-Bags, including purse and backpacks.
Because those are used to conceal goods for shoplifting. You are also not allowed to walk any faster than 1 MPH (1.47 FT/SEC)

This is what disabling right-click AND disabling pressing (not rolling) the scroll wheel feels like. Seriously, pressing the scroll wheel have no "copying" function whatsoever, all it does is allow continuous scrolling and that's it. The only other use of a scroll wheel is to open a link in a new tab.

This is one of the sites that are overzealous and arrogant butthurt of unauthorized use. This puts gmarket.co.kr to shame because at least that site lets you use continuous scrolling, and only have the DRM to restrict rightclick applies to the items page and not anywhere else.

This company, much like:
-When reddit deleting forms labeled "piracy" when the vast majority is talking ABOUT piracy (which that alone is legal) on the subreddit.
-When Google banning the term "kodi" on their search query under the excuse it is associated with piracy, despite that tool being completely legal.

There are reasons why going beyond what is legally required is a bad idea, voluntarily enforcements against legal things is a terrible measure. "Oh just in case we get yelled at by copyright holders", nope, just nope. This company is too afraid to step ANYWHERE closer to the boundaries of the law and resort to banning users who even submits an open source software that aids torrent download (its legal if you download public domain works or works that aren't under copyright).

This behavior is what happened to Bram Cohen on Libtorrent: https://torrentfreak.com/hosting-company-suspends-account-over-open-source-bittorrent-software-*******/. Its better to go to a hosting site that does not enforce its own rules more than legally-required as a "preventive measure" to avoid legal trouble.

Just stay away from this site, with the voluntary enforcements like this, I can imagine if they are too open to attack stuff and users in the name of "more-than-legally-required copyright enforcement".

Internet Archive is basically a website back-upper. Content on the internet cannot last forever. A prime example is when web pages for news content gets deleted. Sometimes, your favorite article may be the victim and suddenly vanish.

Don't get me wrong when it is used for copyright infringment, copyright holders can simply ask to exclude the site.

While the site does permit removing logins if its a legitimate issue (pay per view), add/change post content, etc. there are countless times where websites ask guests to login to view stuff such as links or in the worst case, the entire page being behind a "login-wall".

These types of practice are just for advertising to spam people's emails. Not to mentioned that they cannot be archived with 3rd party sites like the internet archive since the archiver is a robot.

In 2011-12, along with the MPAA, TV companies, some cable companies (like Comcast), its the team who supported the controversial SOPA/PIPA bill. Along with supporting perfect 10 against the fight with giganews (and perfect 10 lost tremendously), this company HATES liability limitations. It wants to be the person who sues anyone who manufactures knifes just because people can use them to murder others.

If that is not enough, they have a long history of assuming people are pirates, from assuming that if you get pop-ups and viruses (malware), its piracy: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2007/02/riaa-parents-pop-ups-viruses-piracy. Soo, is news sites piracy then? Because they have such crap on their sites. How about trying to force radio makers to have DRM on them: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2005/09/riaa-trying-copy-protect-radio. To suing many families. This one is a huge copyright troll. In simple terms, they are one of the copyright maximalist who is afraid of anything that is innovation and thinks that its innovations for pirates.