10 ms·

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

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?

toomuchtodo 6y ago
Github needs to go on the offensive and begin to take action against fraudulent DMCA notices, including justification to seek damages for these claims.
- daheza 6y ago
  Agreed that Github needs to push back, but we should also be contacting our legislature so that they are aware of the abuse of law.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    True, but that's a longer "sales cycle" (election cycles are usually every 2-4 years) if you will. Tactical response vs strategic response.
    - newsclues 6y ago
      A full war needs to be waged, at the tactical and strategic level, for (digital) freedom.
  - kodah 6y ago
    This has been an issue, and has been lobbied for, for at least two decades. The law may do us favors one day but that day is far into the future.
    - ballenf 6y ago
      Has there been even a single move away from ever more draconian copyright? Just the last budget bill had provisions for more criminal enforcement of copyright and with bipartisan support. If this is a slippery slope it's a steady and worryingly unstoppable one so far. Civil disobedience through distributed systems seems like the only answer right now. Your legislators can't hear you over the sound of millions of dollars from Hollywood getting deposited in their campaign accounts.
      - astrange 6y ago
        Corporations can't donate to campaigns, they can only collect voluntary donations from employees and only donate $5000 per campaign. And Microsoft does donate to all the ones you don't like, so on this theory they'd be doing GitHub's bidding.
    - kmeisthax 6y ago
      The future may arrive soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHypmOp8AdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHypmOp8AdM
  - TheDong 6y ago
    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 almost always have already agreed to side with the MPA and other interests that have money. Us telling our legislature we're not happy about it won't help either because, well, what are we going to do? Vote for the person on the other party? Not likely. Vote for another guy? It's unlikely anyone else will even be on the ballot since both the democrats and republicans will avoid having multiple candidates to avoid splitting the vote within the party. I agree that the problem is really legal at its root, but I think we need better plans than "contact your representative".
    - astrange 6y ago
      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.
      - TheDong 6y ago
        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-spending 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-trends https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/election-tren... Those trends, to me, do not paint a compelling story that things are different now.
        colonwqbang 6y ago
        Your conclusion that receiving funding => being popular => winning is not necessarily incorrect. But it is also possible that it is the other way around: being popular => receiving funding => winning I.e. candidates which are more popular tend to have an easier time receiving funding. Or, it could be some combination. This would also explain the outcomes you point to.
- judge2020 6y ago
  Anything requires MSFT legal review, so it'll be at the very least 24 hours or so before they can make decisions like not honoring DMCA complaints.
- fartcannon 6y ago
  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?
  - blahblah12 6y ago
    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.
  - behringer 6y ago
    I use gitlab, myself.
  - toomuchtodo 6y ago
    More effective would be those who are at orgs paying for Github Enterprise to express to their account managers they'll take their business elsewhere if Github is unable to defend it's platform from malicious actors. Github don't care if you take your code elsewhere. They most definitely care about revenue (and developer mindshare a somewhat close second).
    - _jal 6y ago
      Such a claim is pretty weak, actually. MS would not be held responsible for code in someone's GHE instance any more than they would for a movie stored on an NTFS file system. So the sales rep is likely just going to be confused by the attempt to use unrelated leverage.
      - almaember 6y ago
        No, but GHE is paid software. And not like it's impossible to migrate, it's just a fancy git frontend after all. Gogs/Gitea/Gitlab CE is completely capable of doing what it does.
- slg 6y ago
  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.
  - cataphract 6y ago
    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.
    - sodality2 6y ago
      >If they can be sure there is no copyright violation Will they think that, though? I doubt they would take the risk.
    - slg 6y ago
      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.
      - phkahler 6y ago
        >> 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. Hey! Finally a legal reason not to have massive centralization! OK my enthusiasm is exaggerated.
- jacquesm 6y ago
  Github = Microsoft.
- afavour 6y ago
  It's weird that we expect Github to do that, in a way. The repo might well be hosted on there for free, but we all want Github to spend a ton in legal fees to defend something they make zero cash from. I'm not sure what my point is here other than finding it sad that code hosting is so centralised.
  - wolco5 6y ago
    We do. We want to see github or anyone defend any fake lawsuit against them.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Good thing there aren't any lawsuits against anyone then.
  - themacguffinman 6y ago
    I think it's in Github's interests to push back on this. MPA's dubious legal requests likely cost Github time, money, and PR to resolve properly. It adds up over time and I doubt any company wants to be caught in the middle of an arms-race conflict like this, nipping it in the bud could very well be worth the upfront legal fees.
    - Hamuko 6y ago
      I imagine MPA would also be emboldened by this if Github removes the Nyaa repository forever on what is basically a pretty flimsy basis ("Nyaa.si uses the code and that's a piracy website so the code itself is piracy"). What's next? Transmission and rtorrent?
  - wongarsu 6y ago
    Github's market position is in no small part based on network effects and depends on nearly every open source project being hosted there. Now imagine a competitor promising some kind of protection against these kinds of frivolous DMCAs. That could lead to a large chunk of media, p2p and security software moving there, threatening Github's position in those niches and putting that competitor on more equal footing.
hedora 6y ago
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 copyright unenforceable. The letter clearly sets the scope of the copyrights that would be at stake in this case: " each of the major motion picture studios in the United States, specifically, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Universal City Studios LLC, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Netflix Studios, LLC, and their respective affiliates (collectively, the “MPA Member Studios”), which own or control exclusive rights under copyright in and to a vast number of motion pictures and television shows." I'm not a lawyer, but misuse of copyright / trademark should be covered in any decent introduction to intellectual property law course. The MPA lawyers are either incompetent or working under the assumption that their clients are invincible / above the law. I think pushing back on this take down notice would be a slam dunk case.
- dan-robertson 6y ago
  I’m not a lawyer but this feels like a fantasy to me. It seems crazy the MPA would take such a risk if they thought it was likely.
  - walrus01 6y ago
    If you're an ISP, fully automated software sends DMCA notices for video content copyright violations all the time. There's no human in the loop anymore. If you see the vast bulk of these notices, a lot of them are spurious. It's a GIGO problem.
    - monadic3 6y ago
      Presumably that's a much easier for videos than for software.
    - LinuxBender 6y ago
bagacrap 6y ago
The case seems to rest on this precedent: """ See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (“the distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe”) """
Hamuko 6y ago
>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?
boogies 6y ago
The youtube-dl demands were from the RIAA (Recording Industry Artist’s Association). This is from the MPA (Motion Picture Association), the only one of the three major supporters of SOPA and PIPA that GitHub’s parent company (Microsoft) is not an official member of (the third is the ESA — Entertainment Software Association).
- athms 6y ago
  Recording Industry Association of America. It doesn't represent artists, it represents organizations that publish and distribute music.
niea_11 6y ago
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-pirate-anime-giant-nyaa-si-201104/ https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-lawyers-are-trying-to-shut-down... [2] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836709
- molticrystal 6y ago
  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 https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324168129522511872 [1] https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324171441479196672 https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324171441479196672
proverbialbunny 6y ago
When it comes to case law, they have to show intent, and the way they do that is they have to show their software is used for more than just piracy. So, eg, if it's generic torrent tracker software, it's fine, because anyone can use it in a legitimate way (though it helps if someone actually is using it in a legitimate way), but if this is just for the site nyaa.si and no other trackers, they might lose this case if it goes to court.

toomuchtodo 6y ago

Github needs to go on the offensive and begin to take action against fraudulent DMCA notices, including justification to seek damages for these claims.

daheza 6y ago
Agreed that Github needs to push back, but we should also be contacting our legislature so that they are aware of the abuse of law.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  True, but that's a longer "sales cycle" (election cycles are usually every 2-4 years) if you will. Tactical response vs strategic response.
  - newsclues 6y ago
    A full war needs to be waged, at the tactical and strategic level, for (digital) freedom.
- kodah 6y ago
  This has been an issue, and has been lobbied for, for at least two decades. The law may do us favors one day but that day is far into the future.
  - ballenf 6y ago
    Has there been even a single move away from ever more draconian copyright? Just the last budget bill had provisions for more criminal enforcement of copyright and with bipartisan support. If this is a slippery slope it's a steady and worryingly unstoppable one so far. Civil disobedience through distributed systems seems like the only answer right now. Your legislators can't hear you over the sound of millions of dollars from Hollywood getting deposited in their campaign accounts.
    - astrange 6y ago
      Corporations can't donate to campaigns, they can only collect voluntary donations from employees and only donate $5000 per campaign. And Microsoft does donate to all the ones you don't like, so on this theory they'd be doing GitHub's bidding.
  - kmeisthax 6y ago
    The future may arrive soon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHypmOp8AdM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHypmOp8AdM
- TheDong 6y ago
  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 almost always have already agreed to side with the MPA and other interests that have money. Us telling our legislature we're not happy about it won't help either because, well, what are we going to do? Vote for the person on the other party? Not likely. Vote for another guy? It's unlikely anyone else will even be on the ballot since both the democrats and republicans will avoid having multiple candidates to avoid splitting the vote within the party. I agree that the problem is really legal at its root, but I think we need better plans than "contact your representative".
  - astrange 6y ago
    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.
    - TheDong 6y ago
      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-spending 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-trends https://www.opensecrets.org/elections-overview/election-tren... Those trends, to me, do not paint a compelling story that things are different now.
      - colonwqbang 6y ago
        Your conclusion that receiving funding => being popular => winning is not necessarily incorrect. But it is also possible that it is the other way around: being popular => receiving funding => winning I.e. candidates which are more popular tend to have an easier time receiving funding. Or, it could be some combination. This would also explain the outcomes you point to.
judge2020 6y ago
Anything requires MSFT legal review, so it'll be at the very least 24 hours or so before they can make decisions like not honoring DMCA complaints.
fartcannon 6y ago
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?
- blahblah12 6y ago
  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.
- behringer 6y ago
  I use gitlab, myself.
- toomuchtodo 6y ago
  More effective would be those who are at orgs paying for Github Enterprise to express to their account managers they'll take their business elsewhere if Github is unable to defend it's platform from malicious actors. Github don't care if you take your code elsewhere. They most definitely care about revenue (and developer mindshare a somewhat close second).
  - _jal 6y ago
    Such a claim is pretty weak, actually. MS would not be held responsible for code in someone's GHE instance any more than they would for a movie stored on an NTFS file system. So the sales rep is likely just going to be confused by the attempt to use unrelated leverage.
    - almaember 6y ago
      No, but GHE is paid software. And not like it's impossible to migrate, it's just a fancy git frontend after all. Gogs/Gitea/Gitlab CE is completely capable of doing what it does.
slg 6y ago
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.
- cataphract 6y ago
  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.
  - sodality2 6y ago
    >If they can be sure there is no copyright violation Will they think that, though? I doubt they would take the risk.
  - slg 6y ago
    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.
    - phkahler 6y ago
      >> 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. Hey! Finally a legal reason not to have massive centralization! OK my enthusiasm is exaggerated.
jacquesm 6y ago
Github = Microsoft.
afavour 6y ago
It's weird that we expect Github to do that, in a way. The repo might well be hosted on there for free, but we all want Github to spend a ton in legal fees to defend something they make zero cash from. I'm not sure what my point is here other than finding it sad that code hosting is so centralised.
- wolco5 6y ago
  We do. We want to see github or anyone defend any fake lawsuit against them.
  - astrange 6y ago
    Good thing there aren't any lawsuits against anyone then.
- themacguffinman 6y ago
  I think it's in Github's interests to push back on this. MPA's dubious legal requests likely cost Github time, money, and PR to resolve properly. It adds up over time and I doubt any company wants to be caught in the middle of an arms-race conflict like this, nipping it in the bud could very well be worth the upfront legal fees.
  - Hamuko 6y ago
    I imagine MPA would also be emboldened by this if Github removes the Nyaa repository forever on what is basically a pretty flimsy basis ("Nyaa.si uses the code and that's a piracy website so the code itself is piracy"). What's next? Transmission and rtorrent?
- wongarsu 6y ago
  Github's market position is in no small part based on network effects and depends on nearly every open source project being hosted there. Now imagine a competitor promising some kind of protection against these kinds of frivolous DMCAs. That could lead to a large chunk of media, p2p and security software moving there, threatening Github's position in those niches and putting that competitor on more equal footing.

hedora 6y ago

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 copyright unenforceable. The letter clearly sets the scope of the copyrights that would be at stake in this case: " each of the major motion picture studios in the United States, specifically, Paramount Pictures Corporation, Sony Pictures Entertainment Inc., Universal City Studios LLC, Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc., Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures, Netflix Studios, LLC, and their respective affiliates (collectively, the “MPA Member Studios”), which own or control exclusive rights under copyright in and to a vast number of motion pictures and television shows." I'm not a lawyer, but misuse of copyright / trademark should be covered in any decent introduction to intellectual property law course. The MPA lawyers are either incompetent or working under the assumption that their clients are invincible / above the law. I think pushing back on this take down notice would be a slam dunk case.

dan-robertson 6y ago
I’m not a lawyer but this feels like a fantasy to me. It seems crazy the MPA would take such a risk if they thought it was likely.
- walrus01 6y ago
  If you're an ISP, fully automated software sends DMCA notices for video content copyright violations all the time. There's no human in the loop anymore. If you see the vast bulk of these notices, a lot of them are spurious. It's a GIGO problem.
  - monadic3 6y ago
    Presumably that's a much easier for videos than for software.
  - LinuxBender 6y ago

bagacrap 6y ago

The case seems to rest on this precedent: """ See Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, Inc. v. Grokster Ltd., 545 U.S. 913, 940 n.13 (2005) (“the distribution of a product can itself give rise to liability where evidence shows that the distributor intended and encouraged the product to be used to infringe”) """

Hamuko 6y ago

>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?

boogies 6y ago

The youtube-dl demands were from the RIAA (Recording Industry Artist’s Association). This is from the MPA (Motion Picture Association), the only one of the three major supporters of SOPA and PIPA that GitHub’s parent company (Microsoft) is not an official member of (the third is the ESA — Entertainment Software Association).

athms 6y ago
Recording Industry Association of America. It doesn't represent artists, it represents organizations that publish and distribute music.

niea_11 6y ago

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-pirate-anime-giant-nyaa-si-201104/ https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-lawyers-are-trying-to-shut-down... [2] : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836709 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25836709

molticrystal 6y ago
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 https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324168129522511872 [1] https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324171441479196672 https://twitter.com/NyaaV2/status/1324171441479196672

proverbialbunny 6y ago

When it comes to case law, they have to show intent, and the way they do that is they have to show their software is used for more than just piracy. So, eg, if it's generic torrent tracker software, it's fine, because anyone can use it in a legitimate way (though it helps if someone actually is using it in a legitimate way), but if this is just for the site nyaa.si and no other trackers, they might lose this case if it goes to court.