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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

#191

Post by bluGill »

sodality2 wrote: post #66
bluGill wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In which case it should be easy to show the non-infringing uses. Many linux distributions have torrent downloads just as one example.

Agree. Whether or not the boomers in congress and lobbyists in the MPAA/RIAA care, though, is another question

The courts have a different standard though, and so it is much easier to get them to see. DMCA also is submitted under penalty of perjury, so if there is no infringement, then the courts can take criminal action against the accuser.

I'm not clear on exactly what is being claimed so I don't know how real it is in this case.

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

#192

Post by TheDong »

astrange wrote: post #160
TheDong wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether we contact our representatives or not, the MPA / Disney / etc have deeper pockets than we do. We've reached the point where a candidate for the senate will only get the nomination and have a chance to be elected if they spend a significant amount of money on their campaign. There's no campaign limits, so if you don't spend much, you're liable to lose. As a result, the people who run successful campaigns almos…

This year many high profile campaigns that spent the most money also lost, and the ones that won by spending the most were not "corporate" but were Bernie aligned.

While you may be able to point to one or two anomalies, we need more than that. If the MPA has the ear of 70% of congress, that's still enough to have their way on legislation, regardless of a few fringe elements.

As far as I can tell, there's not a large trend that this is changing currently. The candidate that spends the most still wins 70-80% of the time: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/winning-vs-sp...

The cost of running a winning campaign has steadily increased as well: https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/election-tren...

Those trends, to me, do not paint a compelling story that things are different now.

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

#193

Post by niea_11 »

mmastrac wrote: 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?

I think they already know the guys behind the website. From an article [1] mentioned by [2] :

Documents obtained by TorrentFreak dated September reveal the MPA, acting through legal representatives, attempting to pressure individuals who they believe are important at Nyaa and could have the ability to shut the site down.

...

While emailed threats are still a common anti-piracy strategy, we are informed that at least two of the individuals were personally served with legal documents at their homes. Others were served with similar documents via regular mail.

[1] : https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-lawyers-are-trying-to-shut-down...

[2] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836709

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

#195

Post by einpoklum »

astrange wrote: post #160
TheDong wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whether we contact our representatives or not, the MPA / Disney / etc have deeper pockets than we do. We've reached the point where a candidate for the senate will only get the nomination and have a chance to be elected if they spend a significant amount of money on their campaign. There's no campaign limits, so if you don't spend much, you're liable to lose. As a result, the people who run successful campaigns almos…

This year many high profile campaigns that spent the most money also lost, and the ones that won by spending the most were not "corporate" but were Bernie aligned.

Sanders, despite some reformist tendencies, is a also corporate-aligned. He is a staunch supporter of the Democratic Party and of its pro-corporate leadership; supports the military-industrial complex and most (not all) of its foreign interventions; and recently voted for the CARES act, which transferred huge amounts of wealth to large corporations.

Those "Bernie-aligned" elected members of the house have just recently chosen to support Hundred-Millionaire house member Nanci Pelosi for speaker of the house. They did not even do this in exchange for anything. Other Bernie-aligned representatives, already in office before this year, have also neglected to act against their pro-corporate party line.

So, the moneyed elites can indirectly win even if they ostensibly lose.

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

#196

Post by contravariant »

cataphract wrote: post #54
slg wrote: post #48

Earlier 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.

Well the material in question here is without a doubt not copyrighted by the MPA.

And the safe harbour provision only protects Github from hosting or referring people to infringing material, or material that's "subject to infringing activity" (which is different from what's being claimed here as nyaa is very clearly the object).

That said the DMCA contains all kinds of vague phrases, such as

> linking users to an online location containing [...] infringing activity

whatever the hell that may mean.

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

#197

Post by dragonwriter »

bluGill wrote: post #191
sodality2 wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agree. Whether or not the boomers in congress and lobbyists in the MPAA/RIAA care, though, is another question

The courts have a different standard though, and so it is much easier to get them to see. DMCA also is submitted under penalty of perjury, so if there is no infringement, then the courts can take criminal action against the accuser. I'm not clear on exactly what is being claimed so I don't know how real it is in this case.

> DMCA also is submitted under penalty of perjury

No, it's not, except for the claim to copyright ownership of the allegedly infringed work. Particularly, the claim of infringement is not made under penalty of perjury (which makes some sense, as it is a legal and not a factual claim, but you don't have to allege the factual basis for the claim of infringement under penalty of perjury, either.)

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

#199

Post by molticrystal »

niea_11 wrote: post #193
mmastrac wrote: 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?

I think they already know the guys behind the website. From an article [1] mentioned by [2] : Documents obtained by TorrentFreak dated September reveal the MPA, acting through legal representatives, attempting to pressure individuals who they believe are important at Nyaa and could have the ability to shut the site down. ... While emailed threats are still a common anti-piracy strategy, we are informed that at least…

The Nyaa.si devs addressed those notices described in the torrentfreak article on their twitter back in November:

> To briefly address this, we have no plans to shutdown or quit at this time. If we do choose to shutdown eventually we will make a public database dump for any successor entity to use, we will not be just disappearing like our predecessor site leaving everyone else on their own. [0]

> By the way what the fuck is an "anime cartel" MPA? Do we sell cocaine now in your head-canon? Please limit your fanfic posting in public, it is giving me second hand embarrassment. [1]

[0] https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324168129522511872

[1] https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324171441479196672

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

#200

Post by fabianhjr »

donmcronald wrote: post #185
jokethrowaway wrote: post #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).

For small or independent developers Gitea is really nice. The thing with GitHub and (especially) GitLab is they’re really focused on enterprise customers, so, if you’re a small developer, you get forced into using all the bloat that only makes sense once you need a ton of collaboration. I hope Cloudflare pages ends up being as good as the sales pitch. It looks promising if it does.

As for static page hosting, it is better to just use IPFS + Cloudflare Gateway via CNAME.

It has been working great for over a year now. (Eg, my unmaintained but truely serverless blog: https://fabian.social/posts/2020-11-07-ipfs-blogging.html)

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