Hahaha, we’re doing this one again? Alrighty. Nintendo is really banking on a charitability for US DMCA law that hosting services in other countries may no longer have. This is going to get harder for them very quickly I think.

Nobody elected Elon little bro

Maybe you’re missing some context. This comic is about DRM. Back in the day there was a big fight between the companies and consumer advocate groups like the EFF over DRM because it’s awful for the people paying for DRM’d content.

It’s pretty easy to buy DRM-free content now for certain forms of media, esp. books and music, not so much for others. But my whole point here is that if you’re on the side of the EFF and FSF, you’re anti-DRM, which means that you’ll probably support piracy as long as DRM continues to fuck over consumers.

Don’t do this. You will lose quality every time you re-transcode an audio file. AAC is supported by basically everything now.

Also MP3 is a pretty bad format all things considered. The most efficient format is Opus, it’s open source and transparent at 160kbps.

Bandcamp only works if the band originated there. Most labels don’t sell anything through bandcamp. If a label doesn’t release digital lossless for me to buy it’s getting downloaded on Soulseek.

Of course it’s real. This is maybe one of the least shocking beliefs from a webcomic like xkcd ever. Like 1/5 of all the comics are about hacker culture or Linux.

It’s trivial to reorganize your collection (see Strawberry Music Player if you think it’s not) but when it comes to slsk you see the files, filenames, directory structure, bitrate, and bit depth without downloading. I check all the FLAC albums I download and I haven’t seen a fake one yet. I never download lossy files because I can create a perfect transcode from lossless anyways, and I’m probably transcoding to opus which seemingly nobody else does.

You have to realize that in 2025 we’re all ripping them from Deezer or something where you always get basic tags and proper lossless. I’ve never used a private tracker and never will because slsk gives just as high quality and has less condescending pricks.

Seriously, don’t bother with torrents for music. Soulseek is way more reliable and at least someone has had any thing I’ve ever looked for in FLAC.

Are we really still the crazy ones when Microsoft wants to keep a log of screenshots of your desktop?