The trend toward embeds rather than screenshots or direct copying has long struck me as ill-conceived.

At least it's only pr0n. As a vector for malware / spyware injection, this could be even more interesting.

Update:

Relevant xkcd, of course: https://xkcd.com/1698/

h/t Elda King @ Mastodon https://weirder.earth/@eldaking/106626603001624730

It's also worth adding that among the more problematic aspects of "host it yourself" is the "under absolutely no circumstances lose control over the domain name".

The entire notion of transactable (or rented) domain names is appearing to be increasingly misguided as well. That either requires retirement, or DNS needs to be replaced by something less fungible in that regard.

something something ipfs

Nondeletable content is another form of problem. IPFS addresses are also not human-readable / interprable, which presents other risks.

Though that might help, yes.

Content-addressiblity is another possible option.

Screenshots might be ok, but direct copying a video definitely needs the owner's permission, otherwise it would be copyright infringement. The ease of embedding a YouTube link and the difficulty of getting legal and accounting to find a copyright owner and have them sign a contract while trying to publish an article on a schedule ensures embedding is here to stay.

Copyright, like so much else in our lives, is a human construct. There's no law of nature saying it must exist, or that if it exists, it must exist as it does.

There are numerous options:

- De minimis use under fair use.

- Mechanical copyright clearances and royalties.

- Standing arrangements between news organisations and major social media outlets.

- Creative Commons or other licensing for reuse / redistribution. In this case, works which are CC / liberally licenced would see use over those which are not.

- Those not wishing their works to be reused could explicitly note this, though of course under current copyright doctrine, that is the default.

- Licensing agencies similar to ASCAP or Harry Fox for clearing online media requests. (There are several of these now.)

Overall, though, copyright as it stands gets in the way of making information available. The Constitutional intent in the US is concerened with the lack of motive to create content. That manifestly seems not to be the problem at present. Constructing an arbitrary lottery system for lucky shutterbugs / videographers seems to have its own share of issues.

There's also the elephant in the room that embedded contact creates tracking opportunities for the originating sites and their advertising/surveillance partners. Killing that niche would be a net social good.

In the case of video, videos take up a lot of space and transcoding (I believe) is complicated and resource-intensive. I understand people not wanting to roll that themselves, especially when there are free options

Embedding is the easy, lazy, biz-dev-promoted, and copyright-friendly option.

The longer-term risks are the counterargument.

Storage costs of even video, for curated content, are de minimis. That's changed over the past 10--15 years (roughly an order-of-magnitude decrease every 3 years or so). Bandwidth is more substantial, but CDNs can address that w/o the third-party domain list. E.g., "example.com" points "cdn.example.com" to their CDN provider. So long as Example maintains control over their own domain, third-party reregistration isn't a threat.

(Well, until your portfolio of redirects extends to the thousands or millions of domains. Scale has problems all its own.)

Wow that hover text was quite prophetic.

Personally I hope this makes more people read the news. If porn is what it takes to get a more knowledgeable public then show me that gigantic pinis.

It really was, yes. Savour that.