IANAL but to a layperson it might look like Daniel Ray of Muse Group violated https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/873 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/

IANAL but to a layperson it might look like Daniel Ray of Muse Group violated https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/873 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/873 , punishable by up to one year imprisonment. It does seem that the developer is probably violating copyrights - you usually can’t just post Disney’s IP for others to freely use. There does seem to be some gray area. Recent cases have been relaxing the grip of CFAA as it pertains to accessing publicly available APIs. 10-15 years ago it likely would have been a violation. Today I genuinely doubt it, especially if it received a knowledgeable judge like Alsup. But I bet a court would look at the copyright issues separately from the API access. While the API access is (probably?) not against the law, the copyright violations would probably stick without some amazing lawyer work. Perhaps you could make the argument that Muse made these public via their API rather than the developer who scraped them but I don’t feel like that would succeed because it’s really two independent faults. Muse failed to secure the IP and the developer didn’t just access, they republished on IPFS. I had been very critical of the extreme nonsense of Tenacity / Sneedacity. I also felt the general outrage over un-materialized concerns of nebulous “telemetry” was unconvincing. I certainly never expected Muse Group to somehow lower the already low bar down to the Marianas Trench, and yet, here we are. Here’s what Daniel wrote to the developer, in public: >> Upon further investigation, it became clear that <developer> is a Chinese national, but not resident in China. As a guest in his current country, his residency status is predicated on a number of conditions, one of which is not violating the law. >> If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country. >> This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his - Fuck XXQG which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received. As marcan said, that does appear to be blackmail. I have trouble finding a view of that in which it is not blackmail. Blackmail is a crime at state and federal levels for good reason. I’m not a lawyer so I’d be interested to learn ways that this isn’t a violation of California penal code PC 519, very specifically PC 523, and more generally PC 518. If anyone could educate me and help me see how it is not blackmail/extortion, I would genuinely appreciate that. Penal Code 518 defines the California crime of extortion. The law says that a person commits extortion by: obtaining property or other consideration from another person without that person’s consent, …and doing so by means of force or fear. Penal Code 519 says that, for purposes of extortion charges, fear is an emotion generated by certain specific threats. These include the threat to: …accuse a person, or that person’s relative or family member, of a crime, …report a person’s immigration status or suspected immigration status. New York’s law is quite similar, https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/135.60 https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/135.60 but merely a class A misdemeanor.