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XCancel service is suspended until further notice

xcancel.com

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Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#311

Post by rimunroe »

sekh60 wrote: post #255
rimunroe wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you elaborate in what way you find the law mostly doesn't make sense? It has to be flexible in order to work with actual humans. Why should visiting a page on your computer count as copying? Usually when we talk about copying it's someone making a duplicate so it can be accessed later. Only a very technical user is going to be diving into their cache to view that content after the fact. The vast majority of peo…

I can't remember the court case, but Blizzard did argue and win in court that WoW Glider's producers violated copyright law. If I recall correctly violating the TOS meant that an unauthorized copy made by executing the file chasing it to load WoW into RAM was created.

It looks like that was MDY Industries, LLC v. Blizzard Entertainment, Inc., which relied on MAI Systems Corp. v. Peak Computer, Inc. for the relevant part of the ruling.

The person I was responding to was saying that anytime you viewed copyrighted content with a browser you’d necessarily be committing copyright infringement. I’m not a lawyer but I can imagine that the reasoning there would be slightly different from someone simply viewing a post in a browser as part of the intended use of the site.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#312

Post by wraptile »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #309
wraptile wrote: post #307

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can scrape twitter pretty easily yourself with an account (lots of free code on github) but that's the thing - you need an account which is legally complicated but for your own personal use you can just create a dummy account and you'll never be blocked.

Don't they require a phone number? Even if they don't, they probably require email. I don't really want to give them my main email and even less - phone number. So, buying an account seems like less of a hassle, than figuring out where to get a temporary email.

These are all available for couple of cents per email/phone number. I don't want to advertise these services directly but they work very well and you can find them with keywords like "SMS otp code service"

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#313

Post by afavour »

WarmWash wrote: post #297
trey-jones wrote: post #221

Regardless of the legality of the service: I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment. My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

The problem companies have is that "doesn't suck" generally means "it's free with no ads". The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads, or if it does have ads/tracking, that you are trivially capable of blocking them while still totally enjoying the service/product. xcancel, archive, whatever are all tools almost solely meant to access monetized…

> The internet has this innate expectation that everything digital be totally free and have no form of tracking or ads

I don't think we always need to broaden this out to industry wide levels. We can talk about things specifically. In this case, X/Twitter has put a login wall in front of posts to boost signups. It never used to. That's a meaningful difference that people seek alternatives to.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#314

Post by bonsai_spool »

brainwad wrote: post #254
lesuorac wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bartz is an author though. Is X claiming ownership of the posts people make because pretty much every single social media site doesn't so they have section 230 protection.

They can just round up some friendly users and sue under their names. Starting with their own corporate accounts?

These statements would suggest that the precedent is not, in fact, clear

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#315

Post by Banditoz »

rob wrote: post #184

IMO, if you hate Elon so much, you shouldn't be visiting his website. You look very odd and silly if you still want to engage with it and just use a different UI layer (i.e., "XCancel", "Nitter".) If they want you to have an account to read the post and you want to read the post, create an account, log in, and move on. If you don't want to do that, nobody is forcing you to view a public website. There's alternatives…

Is engaging with the site just reading its content, not liking or retweeting? Sometimes I just want to read a tweet thread that was sent to me without ditractions in a straightforward UI.

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#316

Post by [deleted] »

swed420 wrote: post #303
trey-jones wrote: post #221

Regardless of the legality of the service: I always use xcancel instead of X. I don't have a twitter account and I don't want to sign in. I just occasionally want to read what some people had to say about something. Even this is usually a mistake. It's probably better taken as entertainment. My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you.

> My point is: companies stop making your product suck, and people won't have a reason to try and fix it for you. That assumes the company's behavior is rooted in ineptitude rather than malice, which is too generous at this point. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49695912

[deleted]

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#317

Post by bonsai_spool »

ratelimitsteve wrote: post #299
brainwad wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Precedent is pretty clear: competitive uses bad, transformative uses good. Xcancel scrapes and then competes directly with X, whereas LLM labs scrape the internet to make an agentic intelligent bot, a transformative use of the scraped content.

How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe that's clearly derived from the top three results and then placed above those results? That sounds like it's both transformative (in that the recipe created by the AI may not match any one of the scraped recipes perfectly) and also competitive (in that the AI takes page views away from the pages it got the recipes from)

> How clear is it when I google a recipe and get an AI-generated recipe

Recipes can’t be copyrighted

Here’s one discussion about this https://www.nycbar.org/reports/secret-ingredients-how-to-pro...

Re: XCancel service is suspended until further notice

#319

Post by forestry »

embedding-shape wrote: post #133
amiga386 wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> X DMCA'd the repo. No they didn't, or you'd see the text "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown." and wouldn't have access to the repo at all. Instead you have full access to it, its author having merely archived it out of caution. No reference to nitter in https://github.com/github/dmca/

Seems you're right. They have done this in the past though, so wouldn't exactly be a surprise. Here is what the "free speech" platform have censored previously on GitHub: > X Corp. employs various technical protection measures to control access to its copyrighted works, including those at issue here (API schemas and platform content): e.g., official X Corp. API key/OAuth authentication, rate-limiting mechanisms, prop…

I thought the US courts decided that APIs aren’t copyrightable, and the rest of it is not their content.
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