It's important to remember that these projects are not violating copyright law, are not circumvention tools, and that filing a DMCA notice against them is in fact unlawful.
In general no! The EFF is not interested in litigating laws that are firmly established! They spend their resources on cases that can set legal precedent.
When you call about something like this, they’ll try to give you some general advice and refer you to a law firm.
Sadly, you're mostly right and the comments section saying to find a pro-bono lawyer is laughable. I think anyone who believes that exists should actually reach out to a real lawyer and see how that conversation goes. I've had those conversations.
Firstly, they can't exist most of the time you can't actually call a lawyer and talk to them - you get their office and their "job" is to gatekeep that lawyer from making any discussions with anyone who isn't represented or paid for a consultation.
Secondly, once you do get into contact with them you'll get a blank stare or phone silence. This is not how most lawyers view pro-bono work. Most of them have a very small quota of pro-bono work to be done and that's it. They get assigned a case by their firm or go and accept a few a year from the state and they're done with it. The idea that an altruistic lawyer exists out there ready to do free and unpaid work is virtually non-existent today.
Both should be done. Often the actual illegally hosted materials are on servers not friendly with takedown requests or will get immediately reloaded by the pirates. By going after the links it can cut off the ability for people to find the illegally hosted materials.
Is this like how in France, DNS resolvers are legally required to block certain websites? That's right, if you run "unbound" with default options in France you're a felon.
Seems like a strange way to attempt to police the internet by proxy. The Internet should ignore or route around people attempting to police how nodes connect to each other.
I agree that the larger Internet should be capable of routing lawful traffic through jurisdictions where such traffic is lawful to another jurisdiction where the traffic is lawful. But within a country for example local laws should be applied to the traffic.
1) You can have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, but then anyone can route around censorship because you don't know if they're discussing geopolitics or distributing DeCSS.
2) You can't have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, which is >99% of all connections because even different cities have different laws, which is an Orwellian panopticon and the destruction of all privacy.
I'm going to have to insist we stick with the first one.
I am fine with encryption, but there should be a legal process that can stop the violation of laws such as by disconnecting nodes that violate laws or preventing linking to nodes that violate laws.
I think you're missing the concept here that laws change as a packet travels from one switch to another, not to mention what happens after they go under the ocean.
Are you prepared to be held accountable for breaking the laws of repressed countries that sentence people to death for leaving a religion or insulting authority?
I assume not, but then it's an arbitrary game of whos laws and when. The only logical continuation would be if we had a standard of law worldwide, but that's a separate problem in itself and not anywhere near reality today.
Suppose there is a shared server outside your jurisdiction which is hosting a wide variety of content none of which is a violation of the law in their jurisdiction, but 2% of the content is a violation of the law in your jurisdiction. Or isn't hosting any content at all but also isn't a jurisdiction that does the same censorship as yours and then people can use the connection as a VPN.
If people in your jurisdiction can make a secure connection to it, e.g. to get the 98% of the content they have which is lawful in your jurisdiction, then they can also get the content you were trying to ban because you can't tell which one they're doing. Preventing this is all or nothing: Either they can connect to the server that isn't subject to your laws, or they can't. And the latter is heinous and tyrannical.
Which is heartbreaking (and I'd argue misleading too), but not the whole story.
You can only issue takedowns in relation with material that you have copyright over. At least one of these sites I know for a fact routinely scrubs FAKKU licensed content, and abides by takedown requests.
Wait a second... By the view you're espousing right now, doesn't that make this conversation "illegal"? Why aren't we filing DMCA takedowns to HN because the list of the naughty sites is at the top of the page for this very thread?
In this case the files you could view on github literally had links directly to copyrighted works. It was not just that it was compatible with pirate sites.
It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.
It might even be true. Not having a download button is a copy protection measure as defined in the DMCA. If this project bypasses not having a download button, it's an illegal circumvention measure under DMCA.
> Not having a download button is a copy protection measure.
That's absurd. Not having something is different from actively implementing measures to prevent something. I could similarly make the argument that any content that I can watch on my device doesn't really have copy protection measures because those bytes were purposefully copied into my display buffer.
Anti-circumvention provisions are a cancer that needs to die. They can be used to criminalize just about anything.
The problem here is that the complaint seems to be filed by the copyright owner (or licensee) but the code is accessing piracy sites. There could be a circumvention case if the piracy site is the one filing the copyright complaint, but they have not.
> It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.
Is it? Isn't Section 512 the takedown section that applies to infringing works (e.g. notices require "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed", 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)) and Section 1201 the separate anti-circumvention section which has government-imposed criminal penalties but no private takedown provision?
Is that the benchmark? A website that disables the right click to prevent visitors from saving the content can still be saved by the browser. That’s an active measure to disable downloads being circumvented by the browser. So is Chrome going down?
But that's a different process, not the usual notice-and-takedown notice procedure. If it's consider a circumvention device, there is no way to file a counterclaim, among other things.
I'm Jacob, the CEO of FAKKU. The notice being discussed was sent by a 3rd party DMCA agent without our approval or permission. It seems they are using AI to find repositories related to legitimate issues and projects like this one got caught up in it. I've informed them NOT to continue doing this and to immediately cease.
The underlying issue is similar to if there was a website that illegally hosted Netflix content it had downloaded from torrents. Then that illegal website put up advertisements next to the content, or even a paywall cheaper than Netflix to make money. Obviously, that's against the law and Netflix would do something about it. That's generally what we are having to fight against.
Ironically projects like this actually hurt that illegal website, by circumventing THEIR paywall or advertisements, and serving the content inside an app for free (which was originally paid content). It's a complicated issue, but going after projects like this doesn't solve the root problem.
What's up with people insisting that you need a lawyer to respond to a DMCA notice? That's some hilariously poor advice, like holy shit. I wonder if these same (presumably) rich idiots also hire a lawyer to read the terms of service when signing up for a service?
You absolutely do not need and should not spend money on a lawyer for this. The only way you're possibly going to get in trouble is if you're acting in bad faith, you don't need a lawyer to tell you if you are.
And German law is more restrictive than U.S. copyright law, with fewer protections for content uploaders and service providers. There is also no concept of fair use that limits copyright.
I want Codeberg to succeed, but running an open code hosting platform (both in the sense that anyone can create an account, and the service source code is publicly available) in the European Union, and especially Germany, is extremely challenging from a legal perspective. Sadly, once they become successful and popular, they will have to implement all kinds of weird stuff, like proprietary scanners for potentially infringing content prior to publishing it.
Germany and the EU will probably kowtow to the US if the DMCA requests or lawsuits are brought by big enough players.
Big money interests rub shoulders with US politicians, US politicians deal with their overseas counterparts. Therefore, big enough DMCA requests will be mentioned behind closed doors in the same breath as international trade and other geopolitical concerns. Money protects money in deals between close enough friends and allies.
If Codeberg were based in Russia or a US geopolitical adversary, on the other hand, such requests would likely be ignored.
A DMCA takedown is targeted at the host and is a pre-lawsuit thing ("we claim X and if you take it down now your host is safe" via the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions). If they escalate to lawsuits then not sure it's significantly different in Germany vs the USA. It's not like Europe is free from things like blocking all of Cloudflare because the football league wants to.
It's exciting to me recently with the increase in copyright abuse and AI blurring the lines that more people are going to be involved with decentralized systems.
There have been multiple different ways to host git repositories over DHT networks such as BitTorrent. Similarly there have been ways to run DHT backed commands for Linux package managers like apt.
These tools often receive little praise because the value of decentralized systems seems low when centralized systems are working to most users without too many issues.
The enshittification is ramping up so quickly recently that more people are reaching out to me on how to setup Linux syatems, home media servers, etc. I genuinely enjoy these technologies, but for the last decade I had more or less just shut up about them to avoid being that guy.
I was actually just wondering if torrents were the way to go.
I don't have any experience with github so not sure if torrents are at all suitable but I always had the thought that they were decentralized so once released hard to stop as long as someone has a copy.
If you want resistance from USA's bullshit, host in China or Russia. If you want resistance form China's bullshit, host in USA or Russia. If you want resistance from Russia's bullshit, host in USA or China.
For purposes of this chat, Europe == USA since they do as USA says when it comes to copyright.
Moving to a Germany based host of all places, after being legally harassed over copyright, doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea. Aren't the local courts infamous for being awful to deal with?
It's important to remember that these projects are not violating copyright law, are not circumvention tools, and that filing a DMCA notice against them is in fact unlawful.
No one has the guts, time, or money to challenge it though
This is what groups like the EFF are for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_t...
In general no! The EFF is not interested in litigating laws that are firmly established! They spend their resources on cases that can set legal precedent.
When you call about something like this, they’ll try to give you some general advice and refer you to a law firm.
but can't it set a dangerous precedent if it escalates further?
Sadly, you're mostly right and the comments section saying to find a pro-bono lawyer is laughable. I think anyone who believes that exists should actually reach out to a real lawyer and see how that conversation goes. I've had those conversations.
Firstly, they can't exist most of the time you can't actually call a lawyer and talk to them - you get their office and their "job" is to gatekeep that lawyer from making any discussions with anyone who isn't represented or paid for a consultation.
Secondly, once you do get into contact with them you'll get a blank stare or phone silence. This is not how most lawyers view pro-bono work. Most of them have a very small quota of pro-bono work to be done and that's it. They get assigned a case by their firm or go and accept a few a year from the state and they're done with it. The idea that an altruistic lawyer exists out there ready to do free and unpaid work is virtually non-existent today.
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Linking to piracy sites whose content is all blatantly stolen from artists does seem violating to me.
That seems like an argument to go after the actual alleged illegally hosted materials through the proper DMCA takedown request.
Both should be done. Often the actual illegally hosted materials are on servers not friendly with takedown requests or will get immediately reloaded by the pirates. By going after the links it can cut off the ability for people to find the illegally hosted materials.
Is this like how in France, DNS resolvers are legally required to block certain websites? That's right, if you run "unbound" with default options in France you're a felon.
Yeah. The government can dictate what you are and aren't allowed to do. This is not a novel concept.
Seems like a strange way to attempt to police the internet by proxy. The Internet should ignore or route around people attempting to police how nodes connect to each other.
I agree that the larger Internet should be capable of routing lawful traffic through jurisdictions where such traffic is lawful to another jurisdiction where the traffic is lawful. But within a country for example local laws should be applied to the traffic.
There are two options here:
1) You can have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, but then anyone can route around censorship because you don't know if they're discussing geopolitics or distributing DeCSS.
2) You can't have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, which is >99% of all connections because even different cities have different laws, which is an Orwellian panopticon and the destruction of all privacy.
I'm going to have to insist we stick with the first one.
I am fine with encryption, but there should be a legal process that can stop the violation of laws such as by disconnecting nodes that violate laws or preventing linking to nodes that violate laws.
I think you're missing the concept here that laws change as a packet travels from one switch to another, not to mention what happens after they go under the ocean.
Are you prepared to be held accountable for breaking the laws of repressed countries that sentence people to death for leaving a religion or insulting authority?
I assume not, but then it's an arbitrary game of whos laws and when. The only logical continuation would be if we had a standard of law worldwide, but that's a separate problem in itself and not anywhere near reality today.
Suppose there is a shared server outside your jurisdiction which is hosting a wide variety of content none of which is a violation of the law in their jurisdiction, but 2% of the content is a violation of the law in your jurisdiction. Or isn't hosting any content at all but also isn't a jurisdiction that does the same censorship as yours and then people can use the connection as a VPN.
If people in your jurisdiction can make a secure connection to it, e.g. to get the 98% of the content they have which is lawful in your jurisdiction, then they can also get the content you were trying to ban because you can't tell which one they're doing. Preventing this is all or nothing: Either they can connect to the server that isn't subject to your laws, or they can't. And the latter is heinous and tyrannical.
Which is heartbreaking (and I'd argue misleading too), but not the whole story.
You can only issue takedowns in relation with material that you have copyright over. At least one of these sites I know for a fact routinely scrubs FAKKU licensed content, and abides by takedown requests.
what piracy sites is gallery-dl linking to?
I do not want to promote them here, but if you read the linked github thread you will see the names of what extractors were deleted.
Wait a second... By the view you're espousing right now, doesn't that make this conversation "illegal"? Why aren't we filing DMCA takedowns to HN because the list of the naughty sites is at the top of the page for this very thread?
This seems like turtles all the way down.
Through the DCMA lens, does a tool having the ability to download from example.com = linking to example.com?
In this case the files you could view on github literally had links directly to copyrighted works. It was not just that it was compatible with pirate sites.
Where? I looked at a copy from March 16, and I only saw placeholders like 12345 and 12345/67890abcde in the files mentioned in the issue
Look in the test vectors and you will see ones that are not for generic ids.
It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.
It might even be true. Not having a download button is a copy protection measure as defined in the DMCA. If this project bypasses not having a download button, it's an illegal circumvention measure under DMCA.
> Not having a download button is a copy protection measure.
That's absurd. Not having something is different from actively implementing measures to prevent something. I could similarly make the argument that any content that I can watch on my device doesn't really have copy protection measures because those bytes were purposefully copied into my display buffer.
Anti-circumvention provisions are a cancer that needs to die. They can be used to criminalize just about anything.
You will own nothing and you will be happy. Or else.
The problem here is that the complaint seems to be filed by the copyright owner (or licensee) but the code is accessing piracy sites. There could be a circumvention case if the piracy site is the one filing the copyright complaint, but they have not.
> It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.
Is it? Isn't Section 512 the takedown section that applies to infringing works (e.g. notices require "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed", 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)) and Section 1201 the separate anti-circumvention section which has government-imposed criminal penalties but no private takedown provision?
Is that the benchmark? A website that disables the right click to prevent visitors from saving the content can still be saved by the browser. That’s an active measure to disable downloads being circumvented by the browser. So is Chrome going down?
Can you cite the relevant passages from the DMCA that support this argument? I have trouble bringing the two together.
But that's a different process, not the usual notice-and-takedown notice procedure. If it's consider a circumvention device, there is no way to file a counterclaim, among other things.
There is a screenshot in the thread that makes all make sense.
> I'll tell our DMCA agent you're in the clear
https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/discussions/9304#discussi...
similar to patent trolls, there is now a DMCA trolls for hire.
You can't make up things like FAKKU, LLC. This simulation is out of control.
Especially ironic considering Fakku's history and their push to monopolize the hentai publishing industry in the west (!).
I'm Jacob, the CEO of FAKKU. The notice being discussed was sent by a 3rd party DMCA agent without our approval or permission. It seems they are using AI to find repositories related to legitimate issues and projects like this one got caught up in it. I've informed them NOT to continue doing this and to immediately cease.
The underlying issue is similar to if there was a website that illegally hosted Netflix content it had downloaded from torrents. Then that illegal website put up advertisements next to the content, or even a paywall cheaper than Netflix to make money. Obviously, that's against the law and Netflix would do something about it. That's generally what we are having to fight against.
Ironically projects like this actually hurt that illegal website, by circumventing THEIR paywall or advertisements, and serving the content inside an app for free (which was originally paid content). It's a complicated issue, but going after projects like this doesn't solve the root problem.
What's up with people insisting that you need a lawyer to respond to a DMCA notice? That's some hilariously poor advice, like holy shit. I wonder if these same (presumably) rich idiots also hire a lawyer to read the terms of service when signing up for a service?
You absolutely do not need and should not spend money on a lawyer for this. The only way you're possibly going to get in trouble is if you're acting in bad faith, you don't need a lawyer to tell you if you are.
They can just file another DMCA against Codeberg, what am I missing here?
Sounds like Codeberg would still take down the repo, but would be more supportive: https://blog.codeberg.org/on-the-youtube-dl-dmca-takedown.ht... (2020)
Maybe there are more recent examples?
For real. Use https://radicle.xyz/ if you want actual takedown resistance.
Or self-host Forgejo?
This is what the Eden switch emulator does ever since Nintendo went after them on GitHub.
That won't be easy because Codeberg follows German law.
And German law is more restrictive than U.S. copyright law, with fewer protections for content uploaders and service providers. There is also no concept of fair use that limits copyright.
I want Codeberg to succeed, but running an open code hosting platform (both in the sense that anyone can create an account, and the service source code is publicly available) in the European Union, and especially Germany, is extremely challenging from a legal perspective. Sadly, once they become successful and popular, they will have to implement all kinds of weird stuff, like proprietary scanners for potentially infringing content prior to publishing it.
Germany and the EU will probably kowtow to the US if the DMCA requests or lawsuits are brought by big enough players.
Big money interests rub shoulders with US politicians, US politicians deal with their overseas counterparts. Therefore, big enough DMCA requests will be mentioned behind closed doors in the same breath as international trade and other geopolitical concerns. Money protects money in deals between close enough friends and allies.
If Codeberg were based in Russia or a US geopolitical adversary, on the other hand, such requests would likely be ignored.
A DMCA takedown is targeted at the host and is a pre-lawsuit thing ("we claim X and if you take it down now your host is safe" via the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions). If they escalate to lawsuits then not sure it's significantly different in Germany vs the USA. It's not like Europe is free from things like blocking all of Cloudflare because the football league wants to.
This procedure only applies to copyright-infringing content, not to trafficking in circumvention devices. It seems that in this case, it's the latter.
Should that fail there's always https://gitflic.ru where Bypass Paywalls Clean lives
It's exciting to me recently with the increase in copyright abuse and AI blurring the lines that more people are going to be involved with decentralized systems.
There have been multiple different ways to host git repositories over DHT networks such as BitTorrent. Similarly there have been ways to run DHT backed commands for Linux package managers like apt.
These tools often receive little praise because the value of decentralized systems seems low when centralized systems are working to most users without too many issues.
The enshittification is ramping up so quickly recently that more people are reaching out to me on how to setup Linux syatems, home media servers, etc. I genuinely enjoy these technologies, but for the last decade I had more or less just shut up about them to avoid being that guy.
I was actually just wondering if torrents were the way to go. I don't have any experience with github so not sure if torrents are at all suitable but I always had the thought that they were decentralized so once released hard to stop as long as someone has a copy.
https://radicle.xyz/
Thanks this looks interesting.
Didn't know about this project, looks useful. Thanks for bringing it to my attention, FAKKU.
Do I need to bring out the flowchart again?
If you want resistance from USA's bullshit, host in China or Russia. If you want resistance form China's bullshit, host in USA or Russia. If you want resistance from Russia's bullshit, host in USA or China.
For purposes of this chat, Europe == USA since they do as USA says when it comes to copyright.
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Moving to a Germany based host of all places, after being legally harassed over copyright, doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea. Aren't the local courts infamous for being awful to deal with?
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What a plain disgusting disgrace FAKKU has become.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakku#History