Pathetic!
GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
91–100 of 328 posts
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
IANAL, but I am pretty sure Microsoft has little recourse here. The requests would need to be knowingly fraudulent for recourse and that is a huge hurdle to prove that the MPA is knowingly acting in bad faith rather than just being overaggressive. The DMCA desperately needs to be reworked at the very least.
If they can be sure there is no copyright violation, then what would the downside be? By not acting on the DMCA notice, they would lose their safe harbor, which would be inconsequential.
The downside is that the safe harbor protections apply to the entire site. Even if this content is fine, there is certainly some content on GitHub that violates copyright and Microsoft would want safe harbor protections in those instances. They therefore can't completely abandon the DMCA.
My understanding is that in order to continue participating in the DMCA the recipient needs to act on all requests. That doesn't necessarily mean they need to take down the content, just that they need to respond to requests.
There is also no penalty setup within the DMCA for sending a request in which the response is that the content is not in violation. The only part of the DMCA that sets up penalties for the requester is if the requests are made in bad faith. That basically would require Microsoft to show the MPA is malicious in their requests rather than incompetent. That can be difficult to prove.
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#93I hope GitHub is willing to put a stop to this, seems like a stretch. Where this thread of logic end? Should python be blocked by DMCA because it is used to compile code that facilitates copyright infringement?
Personal computers make copyright infringement possible. They need to go .
Good old
Right to Read (Stallman, 1997) https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html
and
The Coming War On General Purpose Computing (Doctorow, 2011) https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Coming_War_on_General_Com...
warning us that entities really are going to try exactly that bullshit. And, as usual, sounding paranoid at the time and "oh, yeah, of course that happened" later.
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
It really shouldn't. their argument is probably that infringement is the main use case of a torrent tracker. edit: I don't have access to the taken down repo but maybe not: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836800
The issue is that (supposedly, we can't know because the repo has been taken down) the code was pre-configured to host copyrighted material. From the complaint: > The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law. I don't know if they mean that the code is preconfigured to connect to a torrent networ…
Agreed, that's what I just commented before reading this reply. They are very loose with their words in takedowns. I bet it's probably not as bad as they say, though. Maybe it has a movie/TV API that it uses, thus is "preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content".
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
Github needs to go on the offensive and begin to take action against fraudulent DMCA notices, including justification to seek damages for these claims.
Microsoft would never do that unless their hands were forced. Too much potential business with them. We could try forcing their hands by removing all our code from Github?
Wrong, Microsoft’s internal incentives are aligned with GitHub remaining independent and building developer mindshare. The, relatively, minuscule business they get from MPA (No Azure, Office subs, Windows subs) is extremely fringe in comparison to losing long term developer mindshare. Even if you thought of representative companies in the MPA,e.g., Netflix, Warner, etc., which are only loosely coupled to the MPA itself, this is still tiny in contrast to overall developer mindshare. This is why they reinstated popcorntime etc etc.
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#96I thought GitHub said they were going to assume good faith by the repository and allow it to stay up until a ruling has been decided (as well as funding legal costs), rather than immediately taking it down under the hand of the "rightsholder". Did I misread their previous statement after the youtube-dl fiasco?
I think that was just for section 1201 claims, not all claims.
> "Going forward, we are overhauling our 1201 claim review process..."
https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo...
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#97I hope GitHub is willing to put a stop to this, seems like a stretch. Where this thread of logic end? Should python be blocked by DMCA because it is used to compile code that facilitates copyright infringement?
This nasty industry tried to make the VCR illegal back in the day so you're not that far off.
A lot people on HN probably weren't alive to know that this happened. It would do people well to read the testimony given before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives back in 1983[1] to get some idea of exactly how willing and eager to destroy innovation copyright maximalists really are.
Nothing suggests the attitudes motivating the MPAA's lack of foresight re: the VCR in 1983, aand their general unwillingness to allow anything to upset the status quo, have gone anywhere in the ensuing decades.
[1] http://cryptome.org/hrcw-hear.htm
(If nothing else, read Jack Valenti's testimony.)
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#98The title is misleading. This isn't some generic torrent tracker. The repo in question is the source of a specific site - nyaa.si [0] which according to the complaint is preconfigured to share copyrighted material: > The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law. This is probably what makes this…
Please don't, however, baselessly propagate their claims. As far as I can tell it's bullshit. The source code may be for nyaa.si but it just contains normal torrent tracker code.
Take a look at the files listed:
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/utils/api_info....
Online here: https://gitlab.com/SIGBUS/nyaa/-/blob/master/utils/api_info....
See anything remotely suggestive? Not I.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/utils/api_uploa...
Nothing interesting here either.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/static/sea...
Why did they pick the search entry XML for the porn section??? (I can only assume their lawyers have no idea what 'sukebei' means.) Anyway, nothing interesting in this file either.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/api_handle...
Again, looks ENTIRELY generic.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/.docker/nyaa-co...
It's a config file with some credentials in it. Again, nothing.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/torrents.p...
More generic looking Flask code.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/nyaa/templates/...
Again... it's a very basic looking HTML template.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/migrations/vers...
Just about the least interesting database migration ever.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/config.example....
I'm not even sure why they would pick this file, seriously. At this point they're just making shit up.
> https://github.com/nyaadevs/nyaa/blob/master/.docker/es_sync...
And another random config file.
If there's even a smidgen of actual copyright infringement in this repo, they failed to find it.
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#99The MPA seems to be getting braver with these takedowns, considering how quickly the youtube-dl one got flipped around. This one seems particularly shaky as you could not use it to explicitly download anything - rather to host data of your own (with no explicit requirement for it to be unauthorized copyright violation). EDIT: perhaps just a ploy to unmask the authors of the torrent site?
>EDIT: perhaps just a ploy to unmask the authors of the torrent site?
Who needs to respond to the DMCA claim with a GitHub repo? If I'd contributed to the source code repository but wasn't involved with hosting the site (I imagine there's quite a few of these), can I file a counter claim?
Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si
#100Is there a mirror?