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Most likely, they went hunting for infringing manhwa[0] pirates, found someone using Tachiyomi to read downloaded pirate manhwa, and threatened Tachiyomi with b
by kmeisthax 3y ago
Most likely, they went hunting for infringing manhwa[0] pirates, found someone using Tachiyomi to read downloaded pirate manhwa, and threatened Tachiyomi with baseless litigation.
Or at least, my assumption was that Tachiyomi is just a gussied up PDF reader, which would make the litigation baseless. If they'd specifically added features for piracy or advertised the ability to use Tachiyomi to read manhwa owned by Kakao Entertainment Corp, then yes, there'd be some basis to this. However, even if it isn't baseless, most Americans are financially precarious enough that merely stepping inside a courtroom would bankrupt them. Having to defend against a copyright lawsuit is out of the question, especially an international[2] one.
As for what's going through Kakao's head? Something between "get off my lawn" and "fuck you, pay me". This isn't a Japanese, Korean, or even East Asian thing. That's just how copyright works, and it's been that way for centuries. If anything you can say it's an American export, because Walt Disney is a horrible person, but that point's already been beaten to death here.
[0] Korean for "manga"[1]
[1] Japanese for "manhwa"[0]
[2] The lawyers in the room will object to my use of the word 'international' here. In reality, either Kakao sues in the jurisdiction of the developers directly, or they sue in South Korean courts and get the judgment domesticated into each developer's jurisdiction. The right to do either is a fundamental part of basically every free-trade agreement ever, so this is an implementation detail.
- juvraj 3y agoThey had extensions to enable the reading of the content, I'm surprised that they didn't strike earlier.
- kernelbugs 3y agoThose extensions were just glorified api clients / web browsers. This is akin to a company threatening the developer of a torrent client.
- hparadiz 3y agoThis. It's open source so I highly recommend people take this into their own hands and clone the repo. There's many forks people use anyway such as TachiyomiAz. Keeping this thing working is trivial. Anyone with basic html and css knowledge can edit plugins. Don't forget that forks on GH get deleted too so make sure to make a new repo.
- Zinu 3y agoIt’s more like a torrent client that has thepiratebay built into it. The main point of Tachiyomi is to have easy access to pirated content directly in the app. Tachiyomi without extensions is useless. Another analogy: An emulator that also displays all ROMs and lets you play them directly. It downloads ROM from various websites, similar to Tachiyomi.
- bsder 3y agoDid they enable reading of content that you couldn't already access with just a web browser? My perception was that if it was behind even a basic login, you wouldn't be able to use Tachiyomi to view it unless you had an actual login yourself.
- kmeisthax 3y agoIf the extensions are specifically intended for pirate sites, that could be construed as the Tachiyomi developers inducing their users' infringement. If Chrome stuck bookmarks to pirate sites in the default user profile they'd be liable, too.