So how’s that DMCA working now?

We’ve written about this before in our posts “My Songs = Your Instagram Photos” and “Two Simple Facts about Technology and Piracy : iTunes Vs. YouTube.” Now Reddit experiences what musicians have been dealing with directly for over a decade, the flawed arguments of ignoring consent online.

Reddit community manager Lisa Liebig, explains:

“We understand that the moderators did the best they could with the situation at hand, but having users purposefully try and circumvent the takedowns was starting to become a whack-a-mole game,” Liebig said, adding, “These factors led us to decide that the subreddit and many of its sister-subreddits were in violation of rule five of the site, ‘don’t…do anything that interferes with normal use of the site.’”

Make no mistake about it, this is about intent. Either we allow lawlessness as the norm, or we enforce the same rule of online as we do in the physical world. Consent is cornerstone of civilized society and mob rule should not be tolerated (not even for free music or celeb nudes).

The same mentality and arguments that make it acceptable to hack and post personal photos have been used as an excuse to ignore the massive, for profit, theft of personal copyrighted works for more than a decade. Neither is acceptable. As the future of music is tied to ad funded piracy, so is privacy tied to internet profits by the same lack of personal consent.

We applaud Reddit for not standing on a soapbox conflating personal rights, privacy and consent with some twisted notion of censorship and some nonsense about “breaking the internet.” Indeed, as we noted in our post “Principles for an Ethical and Sustainable Internet” technology may change but principles do not. It would seem that at least just for today, maybe the internet is growing up, just a little bit…

Read the Full Story at ReCode:
Reddit Bans Celebrity Photo Forums After a Week of “Whack-a-Mole”