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GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

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Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Until you are paying for 10 distinct services, and the music colossi start to create services of their own. Who you gonna call? Plex+sonarr

Maybe unpopular opinion: you don't need to pay for 10 distinct services at the same time. Like, there's a show that I want to watch on Crave, I pay for a month and watch it - along with other stuff that might interest me. Then there's something else on Starz - I do the same. 2 concurrent streaming service is good enough for most people, I think, specially considering most streaming services add full seasons at once,…

It definitely adds some friction though. At least for me, I would probably just ignore, say, new Disney+ content rather than try and go through a whole setup and cancellation process. It might be annoying. I might forget. There is a reason why "see what subscriptions you're actually using" is a frequent first step in programs to rein in your personal finance.

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#144
post #78
post #44

Github bowing to these requests is really disappointing. Makes me sad.

U.S. organizations need to follow U.S. law. Github has shown that they're trying to fight these things, with yt-dl reinstatement and a recent donation to the EFF. https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo...

After reviewing the claim, the law lets them choose whether they want to take it down in exchange for immunity.

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#145

I 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?

Nothing will change much, as soon as GitHub is still a user-generated content host. They have to follow DMCA safe harbor practice, which is to obey the claim until proven false, in trade with not get sued themselves as a host.

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#146
post #39

Reading the complaint, it's clear their focus is not on generic tracker source code but on copyrighted file metadata being preloaded into the tracker source code: > 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've looked at all the "infringing" files that they link to, from a bundled zip download from the web archive, and I don't see anything that's "preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content".

The most iffy is the list of categories in utils/api_uploader_v2.py but there's no category that doesn't contain works out of copyright or under a license permitting redistribution, and even if that were not the case, that would still not be tantamount to being "preconfigured to find" anything in particular.

There's also the URL of the pirate site, but google also provides it, as do some comments here...

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#147

This site is mainly used to share Japanese media. The streaming services have really dropped the ball in this area. They either don't simulcast to other parts of the world (netflix), offer terrible subtitles that are worse than fan translations (netflix, crunchyroll), or just plain never release content for international audiences. I pay for every relevant streaming service I can, and even when I can access legal, of…

Yeah, I subscribe to Crunchyroll, Netflix, Prime Video, and Funimation. Or in other words, 100% of services with streaming anime available in my country. To be fair, seasonal anime gets a good coverage with those. Netflix's player is pretty good, but the rest vary from meh to awful (I have never successfully changed the timestamp in Funimation's player without playback crashing within the next minute).

But back catalogues availability is not so good. Crunchyroll and Netflix have the most popular stuff like Naruto, Code Geass or Evangelion but literally nobody has, say, The Devil is a Part Timer in my country.

Movies? The SAO movie got a physical showing in my country, the Made in Abyss movie actually did show up on a pay per view non-region locked streaming service and... that's literally it.

Soundtracks? It might be on Spotify. This week. But maybe not next week. I've no fucking idea, but the constant appearence and disappearence of soundtrack songs from my playlists has even caused me to stop moving spotify.

So for movies and back catalogues, my only "legal" option is to ship DVDs/Blurays and a region locked player from the US, or maybe sometimes I can get stuff from the UK in my own region. For soundtracks, even that is not usually an option. Does that legally entitle me to pirate it? No. Do I care? Not really, I feel I've tried my best

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#148
post #75
post #9

The 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?

Sooner or later, one of these projects will counter-sue for misuse of copyright. Misuse of copyright is when a copyright holder attempts to illegitimately expand the rights granted to them by their copyright in some work (in this case, quashing competition from distribution channels that are used to distribute unrelated copyrighted material). The normal punishment for misuse of copyright is the rendering of the copyr…

Actually no. DMCA is super one sided.

All you need for DMCA takedown notice is "a good faith belief" that reported content is infringing copyright you own (or is owned by someone you represent).

The opposing party has to prove that the claim was knowingly false and malicious for the claimant to be charged with perjury.

The opposing party has to prove actual damages in court to get any compensation. You may get legal fees back too (up to the court), but that's only likely to happen if it's obvious at the first glance that the claim was bogus.

This is all you can do to someone filing the notice. Notice doesn't even establish a jurisdiction (and cease-and-desist letter does) - so you can't counter-sue in your jurisdiction to get declaratory judgment that copyright is invalid.

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#149

Note that there are various older forks [1] [2] available that allow to verify that the project isn't in fact "preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content". The most 'incriminating' file is "api_uploader_v2.py", which lists categories such as "6_2 - Software - Games". Which is not infringing at all. While unrealistic, it's technically possible that some of the files have ch…

You can still download the zip file of the repository through archive.org. And there is no direct link (took a quick look) to copyrighted content in the source code. If they shutdown the main site, without a data backup, the code is useless. Users will have to re-upload and re-seed the torrents they have.

Tangentially, I'm interested in the concept of the torrent data moving into something somewhat indestructible by also highly available, such as the bitcoin blockchain. Your torrent site then "mounts" the blockchain, scanning the chain for the torrent data (magnet URIs) necessary to bootstrap a corpus.

Re: GitHub has received a DMCA from MPA about torrent tracker nyaa.si

#150
I think the only solution is self-hosting. Would a hosting provider (excluding AWS, given recent news) comply with these baseless requests?

I'm personally done with Github.

Gitlab is a bit too heavy to run but I can live with Trello and my own git server - all my OSS projects I care about have their own website anyway (ironically, moving from Github Pages to Netlify will be the most annoying part).

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