WHERE MY BRONIES AT?

So I think the Internet just exploded now that Derpy is a named, voiced canon character.

It’s also worth noting that despite the shutdown of Ponyarchive, the torrents they linked to are still up and running fine.

So, as Equestria Daily has reported, Ponyarchive has been shut down, and the site currently displays a bitter response to the legal threats that forced the shut down.



What’s interesting to me is the fandom’s response to this shutdown, and particularly their reaction to Ponyarchive’s bitter response.

In the comments on the Equestria Daily post, the overwhelming sentiment is that Ponyarchive got what was coming to them, and that the best thing for fans of the show to do is to buy/download the show only from official sources. In other words, to engage with the show only in the ways the creators explicitly endorse.

There are three points of dissent that are mostly drowned out:
1) That the downloads provided by Ponyarchive with the Hub logos removed are a valuable resource for fan video creators.
2) That fans outside the US have no legal access to the show for the most part, and certainly no access to even the limited downloadable iTunes videos, which Ponyarchive had to colour-correct anyway.
3) That Hasbro owes fans who provide them with revenue by buying merchandise and promoting the franchise more than fans owe Hasbro obedience to their wishes.

It’s worth noting that if Hasbro strictly enforced its copyright and trademarks to the full extent allowed by the current copyright regime, almost all fan-created content would receive similar legal threats, and given almost all fans’ inability to fight even for legal, fair use of Hasbro’s copyrighted and trademarked intellectual property, it would pretty much all have to be taken down. Hasbro has chosen to make legal threats only against Ponyarchive, but current copyright law allows them to make the same threats against pretty much all fan-created content, if they chose to do so. It’s also worth noting that while Hasbro can make the threats it has made against Ponyarchive, their ability to legally enact them is less clear-cut. But they don’t have to make good on their threats to get Ponyarchive to shut down, they only have to scare the site’s owners into compliance.

What’s also clear is that the same fans who think Ponyarchive got what they deserved have rallied against the removal of popular fan musical artist Alex S’ work from YouTube. There’s a clear difference in that the takedown requests have obviously not actually come from Hasbro in this case, but they’re absolutely no different from what Hasbro is legally entitled to do.

The Brony fandom has obviously gained a lot from conforming to Hasbro’s standards for acceptable engagement with the show for the most part. But there doesn’t seem to be a great awareness of the trade-offs involved with that conformity on the part of a large number of fans.

EDIT: I removed the link to Ponyarchive, since the site has apparently become infested with a trojan downloader.