'Minecraft Movie' Leaks Online: Full Unfinished Version Shared
54 comments
·April 6, 2025mystraline
lolinder
A more precise conclusion would be: "This shows that US based companies will actively self-censor to avoid getting sued for copyright infringement. Russian-based companies don't have to respect US copyright law, so they have no legal obligation to remove infringing content."
Yes, copyright infringement is not protected speech in the US and you can be held civilly liable for it. Yes, adversarial countries don't enforce each others' laws. So yes, Yandex is a good place for finding pirated works. But that hardly makes it a bastion of "free speech", it just means that they don't have the same legal risks as Google does.
mystraline
DMCA 1201 indicates that I can be held criminally liable, not just civially, for free speech discussing a method of working around, bypassing, or defeating a perceived "technical measure of prevention".
That alone is violation of the US govt's 1fa restriction purely in the favor of companies.
refulgentis
AFAIK the 1st Amendment is about whether the government can prevent you from speaking, not there are 0 consequences to all speech.
When I think that, I also think, "but isn't it bad to Illegal talking decryption?"
Then I think: Law is ambiguous compared to a logical proof, and can only be seen through cases.
I resolve that I'll be the first to stand up and scream if they deport someone for simply discussing the academics of DVD decryption, and that's enough to make me feel comfortable saying it's okay the DMCA is used to prevent stealing.
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xp84
Yeah somehow I bet that if it’s content highly illegal in Russia it’s going to be very much the other way around.
os2warpman
Yandex only became a Russian company fairly recently, after over 20 years of being based outside of Russia.
It was sold, below market value, to a group of Russian investors last year for the specific purpose of controlling it and suppressing free speech.
Nobody, not a single human being in the entire history of humanity, has ever died because they couldn’t pirate a children’s film.
Many people have died, and continue die, because of Yandex’s cooperation with the FSB in shaping opinion, controlling the dissemination of information, and directly reporting users to the FSB for problematic searches.
Pirating children’s films and controlling the availability of news articles are different tiers of free speech.
Teever
Those aren't quite comparable.
How many people have died because of American attempts to 'shape opinion, control the dissemination of information, and directly reporting users to the law enforcement for problematic searches?'
Sure Russia is much worse than the US but Americans are still being persecuted for smoking weed which is just absurd.
skinnymuch
Far more people die because of western corps cooperation with western state depts/govts as being stenographers of the IOF/IDF.
blahaj
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Aurornis
> Weirdly, Russian based companies have less a problem with the free speech the USA kicks us offline for.
Yes, Russia, a place always known for enabling free and unrestricted speech.
You’re not seeing some deep commitment to free speech. You’re seeing a company in a foreign country not prioritizing matters that apply to another country around the world.
Don’t confuse one for the other.
toast0
> Yes, Russia, a place always known for enabling free and unrestricted speech.
The US is well known for enabling free speech, because you can criticize President Trump without negative consequences. But it's the same in Russia; you can criticize President Trump all you want.
rurban
Ha, try that as foreigner crossing the border, or just doing a US layover. You'll be treated as criminal. There never was free speech in the US neither
RamblingCTO
Try criticizing the Ukraine war or Putin
bigstrat2003
> This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.
For better or for worse, the US only has free speech protection which is binding on the government. Sometimes that's good (you can kick out people who don't behave). Sometimes that's bad (censored media). But even in the cases where it's bad, it's not clear to me that it would be worth it to enact freedom of speech laws that apply to private parties. It seems like the cure might be worse than the disease in that case.
joshfee
The problem with enforcing "freedom of speech" on private parties is that it essentially the same as infringing the speech of that private party.
The only issue I have is when companies can play both sides and in one breath claim they're neutral for the purpose of section 230 protection, and then in the next breath take part in censorship because it's better for business.
Pick a lane, either lane, but you shouldn't get it both ways
jcranmer
> The only issue I have is when companies can play both sides and in one breath claim they're neutral for the purpose of section 230 protection, and then in the next breath take part in censorship because it's better for business.
The entire point of §230 is to immunize companies for the consequences of that which you decry as censorship (i.e., moderation).
sepositus
> This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.
I'm a bit confused by this. Are you saying that publishing the text (speech) of a copyrighted book, and then having the link to that text de-indexed, is the equivalent of violating the First Amendment? I assume Google and Bing just treated this as any other copyright violation.
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Fogest
Anytime I am searching for my live TV PPV "linux iso" streams I always pull up Yandex. Same goes for pretty much anything piracy. Even sometimes searching for research/stats that are more "controversial" are often down-ranked in Google and hard to find. Unfortunately there is a lot of political bias I've noticed more and more often in Google Search results, and resorting to Yandex sometimes results in better results.
I personally am a Kagi subscriber as well as find Google's search results in general to be terrible. Censorship/political bias/blogspam/terrible AI results are all the big factors for me switching away from using them much at all.
userbinator
Russia is just more interested in censoring political speech than going after copyright claims. The same applies to China.
mitthrowaway2
Interesting! Do they also have the Navalny movie?
netsharc
Going to yandex.com and looking for Navalny gives results.. so too for "Putin's palace", Navalny's team's documentary about the regime's corruption (links to navalny.com and medusa.io).
Isn't Yandex a Dutch-based company now? Then again, searching from within Russia might give different results...
Try using Facebook Messenger to send a link to PirateBay; it's blocked. I find it disgusting that our communication media is controlled by billionaires who've revealed themselves as fuckwits on Jan 20. The same dislike is there for corporations controlling what we can find online... Then again, I really don't mind YouTube refusing the hosting of videos from Covid conspiracy nutters (yes I could be wrong and they could be right, but I guess like every other nutjob, I'm comfortable in my ignorance pretending to be confidence.)
jsheard
I wish studios would share these behind-the-curtain versions more often, but I suppose that would go against their apparent belief that CGI is a dirty word that can never be acknowledged even if that means outright lying about how much they used. The last Planet of the Apes movie did go there though, the 4K Bluray includes a "raw cut" of the entire movie which shows exactly what the camera saw.
j_bum
Agreed.
You may already know them, but the “Corridor Crew” channel on YouTube has a great “VFX Artists React” series where they do deep dives into vfx scenes and the behind the scenes.
They often have industry pros come in and share scenes from their work. Great channel and series!
Example vid:
nailer
Oh, I’m surprised you wrote that. I follow a lot of VFX accounts and they are constantly posting their work, not full versions of films but enough to show how scenes were built.
jsheard
Typically the way it goes is that the studio underplays how much CGI they used during the marketing campaign, while the VFX vendors are forced to bite their tongues, and then 6 months after the movie debuts their NDA expires and they finally get to show how much CGI there really was. This series is a great watch on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ttG90raCNo
In the later parts there's some really egregious examples where promotional behind-the-scenes footage was actually doctored to key out the green screens or present composited shots as if they were done in-camera.
IlikeKitties
nfo: https://pastebin.com/iLk9B0ef
COMMENTS: │ │ THIS IS A WORKPRINT! THIS IS NOT A FINAL VERSION OF THE MOVIE! │ │ Contains unfinished CGI and different songs than the final release. │ │ Colors have been adjusted. │ │ Retail English audio synced. │ │ Logo and ads have been removed. │ │ English AI SRT Sub Also Added │ │ If You Have Any Cam Audio Or Video Send Me A PM │ │ or Email to will1869@protonmail.com or DLManic987@proton.me
haunter
The Telesync version is out for days too and it's pretty good quality.
But honestly the workprint version's jankiness somehow makes it fun. Like those music videos with music removed on Youtube
hifikuno
I remember years ago seeing a prerelease version of one of the wolverine movies. As the CGI models were still grayscale, it was cool to see at what points the fights were actors and what points it was CGI.
starshadowx2
That was X-Men Origins: Wolverine. I was also thinking about that when I heard about this leak. This was the infamous Deadpool scene from it without the finished special effects, it's actually pretty interesting to see it this way.
jvm___
Way back when the first spy kids movie leaked without CGI so the kids were flying Superman style without the associated backdrops.
aaron695
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This is also why I like Yandex and non-US and non-european search especially in terms of censorship by copyright in the USA.
If you go to Yandex and search "a minecraft movie torrent" the first 6 links are the preprint that variety.com 'claims' were mostly removed. In reality, the only sites deindexed were Google and Bing.
This shows that the limits of the first amendment are speech when its convenient. Links, webpages, and more are speech, but also completely censored in the US media.
Weirdly, Russian based companies have less a problem with the free speech the USA kicks us offline for.