DimeTOS:Allowed Torrents

From DimeWiki

The content and form of every torrent uploaded to DIME's tracker must adhere to these rules. If you are not sure whether your torrent will comply, please ask the moderators first. Torrents that are in violation or are contra bonos mores of live music trading will be banned without advance notice.

Part 1: Material and Content

• All torrents must be of music-related content.
• No audio torrent may distribute any lossily compressed music [e.g. MP3, VQF, OGG, or audio extracted from digitized videos (other than audio extracted from those DVDs that are explicitly known to have lossless LPCM audio)]. This rule is relaxed only for the particular situations detailed on the page at this link in this wiki. That article also covers MiniDisc recordings as well as lossy webcasts and digital satellite broadcasts.
• No torrent may distribute any official material. That term includes:
  • All official releases, in print or out of print, whether sold world-wide or only in certain areas;
  • Upcoming official releases announced by the artist or the label;
  • Alternate recording sources of any officially released performance, unless the artist's published policy for trading permits collectors to continue trading them after another capture has been released officially;
  • The audio of any performance used as the sound on officially released video material - even if the recording is from another source than that the sound in the officially available material;
  • Video material whose audio portion has officially released content (for example, music videos and other promotional videos: even if the visual footage is unreleased, almost all of them use an edit of the official audio for their sound; for another example, television appearances where performers mime or lip-synch to playback of the official audio release);
  • Remixes, remasters, alternate mixes, and alternate edits of any official material;
  • Older official material that may have lapsed into the public domain by the mere passage of time without formal release by act of the rightsholder: copyright durations vary from country to country and are frequently extended by new legislation, so on DIME the only safe rule is once official, forever official;
  • Because subscription cable/satellite/broadcast services (such as XM Radio and SIRIUS among others) and premium cable/satellite channels (suchas HBO, Showtime, Canal+ [and subsidiary channels such as Canal Jimmy], Wowow, Mezzo [and channels it owns, such as Muzzik], Premiere [of Germany], SkyPerfecTV, and Globosat, among others) assert and enforce copyrights on all their content, even that which airs unencrypted, the following are prohibited official material:
    • Recordings (audio or video, from any source) of material that was produced by or for such a station or channel [in the absence of contrary evidence, we will infer that the content was produced for the first channel that aired it],
      and
    • Recordings (audio or video) captured from such a channel or station, regardless of who produced it or who aired it first;
  • Material that has aired in a pay-per-view event on any station or channel, even if the torrent's copy is derived from another source;
  • Content presented to a paying audience at another time or another location than those of the live performance, such as a broadcast via closed-circuit television or a showing in a theater;
  • Material distributed to fan club members as part of the membership package included in their club dues;
  • A bonus or a premium acquired by paying for something else, such as the purchase of another recording, a magazine, a book, or a concert ticket, or such as a charitable or political donation;
  • So called "bastard" mixes and DJ sets;
  • Extensive selections from the lyrics of any published song, or the entirety of such lyrics, whether as text or in an image, beyond a short excerpt.
• No torrent may distribute any material of artists, either individuals or bands, who do not agree to the electronic distribution of their unofficially recorded live shows. For a list of bands/artists see article Not Allowed Artists and Bands.
• No torrent may distribute recordings made at the venues or events listed in the article Not Allowed Venues/Events.

Part 2: Form and Presentation

• No torrent may contain compressed archive files, e.g. .RAR, .ZIP, .GZ. For content allowed on this tracker it doesn't make much sense to pack it in compressed archives. Thus, the uploader of a torrent with such filetypes presumably wants to hide impermissible content.
• Likewise, no torrent may distribute disc image files (e.g. .ISO, .IMG, .NGR, .CDR, or the like) or uncompressed archives (such as .TAR). With those as well, without downloading the torrent it is impossible to know just what filetypes will come out of them. If the component files are permissible on DIME, torrent the unbundled files; if they are not, keep the material off here.
  There is one exception: a VCD with chapters and menus can be torrented only as a .BIN file with a cue sheet in a .CUE file, and therefore a disc image will be acceptable in that one situation; however, the cue sheet must be duplicated in the torrent's external information (either the outboard info file or the description) so that users and moderators will see the filetypes being distributed.
• Torrents without a self-explanatory title or detailed description indicating all contents, as well as torrented data not containing an info-file in plain text format (file extensions .txt or .asc) with the content's description, as well as torrents without .md5 checksums or FLAC fingerprints will be considered as contra bonos mores of live music trading and are not allowed on DIME. See this wiki's Information Requirements page for more details. The information must be in English; additional languages are optional.
• As a corollary to the above provisions in this part, the files inside every torrent on DIME must include some music-related content (generally as playable audio or video), plus description of its music, plus checksums, and they must be in separate files. Thus a single-file torrent cannot be in compliance, and every DIME torrent must be of a directory.
• No torrent may contain losslessly compressed but platform-dependent filetypes like .MKW, nor platform-dependent file or directory names. It is contra bonos mores of live music trading to exclude users of other platforms from the download!
• No torrent may contain uncompressed PCM audio files like .WAV, .AIFF. Including such files in a torrent is a huge waste of bandwidth - both for seeders and for downloaders.
• Microsoft Windows executable filetypes like .EXE and .COM are not allowed in a torrent because of the risk of carrying viruses.
• Any torrent whose structure or form is determined by the moderators to be contra bonos mores of live music trading is subject to ban, even if all other policy provisions are met. Many violations of this provision can be corrected, often within the existing torrent or, when that is impossible, with a repost; if the ban notice does not provide instructions to the uploader, the uploader should email the moderator desk for further information.

Part 3: Purpose

These are the motivations behind the policies detailed above:

1. to stave off legal trouble
2. to respect artists’ rights
3. to keep the tracker to its purpose of preserving and sharing music-related material
4. to avoid preventable difficulties and minimize annoyances for downloaders
5. to make optimal use of the BitTorrent protocol