Discussion
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LeonTing1010: Following the same pattern as youtube-dl. GitHub DMCA is increasingly a chokepoint for open-source scraping tools, even when they don't circumvent any technical protection.Codeberg is a pragmatic choice — Forgejo-based, hosted in Germany, different legal framework, and no business incentive to comply with marginal takedown requests.The broader trend is worth watching. Web scraping tools are in a strange legal gray area: the web was built to be machine-readable, but platforms increasingly want to control which machines can read it.
perching_aix: 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?
ronsor: 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.
charcircuit: Linking to piracy sites whose content is all blatantly stolen from artists does seem violating to me.
raziel2701: what piracy sites is gallery-dl linking to?
ernsheong: They can just file another DMCA against Codeberg, what am I missing here?
charcircuit: 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.
notThrowingAway: That won't be easy because Codeberg follows German law.
HotGarbage: Should that fail there's always https://gitflic.ru where Bypass Paywalls Clean lives
echelon: 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. Big enough DMCA requests will be mentioned behind closed doors in the same breath as international trade and other geopolitical concerns. Money protecting money in deals between close enough friends and allies.If Codeberg were based in Russia or a US geopolitical adversary, on the other hand, any such requests would likely be ignored.
ddtaylor: That seems like an argument to go after the actual alleged illegally hosted materials through the proper DMCA takedown request.
sammy2255: No one has the guts, time, or money to challenge it though
landr0id: For real. Use https://radicle.xyz/ if you want actual takedown resistance.
_imnothere: What a plain disgusting disgrace FAKKU has become.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakku#History
charcircuit: 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.
ddtaylor: 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.
logifail: Through the DCMA lens, does a tool having the ability to download from example.com = linking to example.com?
charcircuit: 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.
ddtaylor: 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.
userbinator: This is what groups like the EFF are for: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_litigation_involving_t...
SergeAx: You can't make up things like FAKKU, LLC. This simulation is out of control.
14: 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.
huijzer: Or self-host Forgejo?
ddtaylor: 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.
gutley: I would like to caution readers against visiting the sites that have the banned extractors listed for them. I did that and was visually accosted by cartoon pornography of young girls who look like children.It seems that this is a legal kerfuffle over a pornography downloader for pedophiles.
ddtaylor: 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.
KomoD: 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
charcircuit: Look in the test vectors and you will see ones that are not for generic ids.
