>Specifically, at the URL, the Repository hosts and offers for download the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows).
I'd like for Motion Picture Association to publish a step-by-step guide on how I can engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows using this piece of software.
Because I imagine at some point in the guide they'd tell me to generate torrent files of copyrighted files I have and upload them to the site, which is really outside of this project.
Or is Nginx also infringing because when downloaded, it allows me to start engaging in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows by enabling directory indexing and uploading MP4s?
>> The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
It's one thing to host software that can be used for this. It's another to host software specifically configured for it. Still might be legal. I wanted to see what the linked configuration files actually contain, but they've been taken down.
It still smacks of going after the tools rather than the infringers.
Okay this is just getting weird. One of those is just a database update that counts how many comments a torrent has. Another is just some database credentials (probably not the ones you want to use in production, unless you don't mind people knowing your passwords). The HTML template for the home page is also in there for some reason. And then to finish things off they added the OpenSearch definition which I think you can use to add Nyaa/Sukebei as a search engine to your browser.
Really the most suspicious ones are the python scripts in utils, which connect to the api on https://nyaa.si by default. Although those also only seem to allow you to upload torrents (not an infrinfing activity) and download the info of a single entry on nyaa (possibly infringing?).
Also they curiously left out sync_es.py, not that that one does anything too interesting (it synchronizes a elasticsearch database with a MySql database) but it is the script that actually uses those configuration files they picked out.
This is only true if you consider information that can be used to pirate works as "infringing material" that falls under the DMCA (in particular its safe harbour provision).
Which would effectively give any copyright holder carte blanche to censor any information that can be used to infringe their copyright.
Well copyright is, when it comes down to it, not very logical.
In the digital world every picture, video, audio or other copyrighted material is represented as a number, which can pretty much be any number, if the encoding can be freely chosen.
Transferring and storing those numbers (looking at you π) could be a copyright violation or not, pretty much just depending on the intent.
Because proving intent is very difficult, the rules seem to have changed here a bit, so now the defendant would have to prove that they didn't intent to do so... Which might be even more difficult, but who with money and influence cares about that.
Exactly... that was demonstrated with DeCSS and AACS a long time ago, with shirts printed with colors "encoding" the magic number and whatnot.
I would love for someone to actually code this in the "rockstar" language. With sufficient "base" conversions, you could make any program be represented by the constitution.
Copyright advocates in the past have successfully argued that empty CDs are tantamount to copyright infringement. Some countries (Spain) have even had (still does?) a tax on HDDs and SSDs.
You pay extra when purchasing a harddrive, because it's possible to put pirated works on it.
> You pay extra when purchasing a harddrive, because it's possible to put pirated works on it.
Well, if we've already payed for it...
Jokes aside, every time I start feeling vaguely guilty about pirating something (which I only do from large corps, not indies) something like this pops up.
Not really. Here, I can publicly say that I've got 12 terabytes of hard drives, about 8 of which are absolutely full of copyrighted content. Games, movies, music, PDFs, software. I even seed quite a bit of it.
Any MPAA representative, or the legal equivalent in my country are invited to get fucked, since they would need access to said hard drives to prove it.
> Because I imagine at some point in the guide they'd tell me to generate torrent files of copyrighted files I have and upload them to the site, which is really outside of this project.
One of the files they link to is a utility for uploading torrent files (/utils/api_uploader_v2.py). As far as I can tell, it doesn't generate the torrent files, just uploads them.
I wouldn’t go that far. The DMCA mentions “linking”. And while it’s a big stretch to say that a torrent or magnet link is a “link”, they do tell you “how” to find something. If that something is copyrighted, I could see an MPAA lawyer arguing that a torrent “links” to the infringing content. Although, OTOH, if I told a friend to “go to thepiratebay.org and search for $movieName”, it would be harder to prove I’m infringing. It’s a very gray area.
Yes, but without them how will the consumers be able to access the nonpirated versions.
In all seriousness though, if the ISPs banded together, they could hold the (first)world hostage. Trying to hold the ISP accountable for what it's users are doing is an extremely dangerous precedent. Right now (or at least last year) there were huge debates going on about just how much culpability social media platforms should take in regards to content posted on them, and it was chaos, everybody had different opinions and policies. Now imagine what that chaos would do if, instead of content rules being different from facebook to twitter, the rules differed from Verizon to Comcast
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?
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.
All you need for DMCA takedown notice is "a good faith belief" that reported content is infringing copyright you own (or is owned by someone you represent).
The opposing party has to prove that the claim was knowingly false and malicious for the claimant to be charged with perjury.
The opposing party has to prove actual damages in court to get any compensation. You may get legal fees back too (up to the court), but that's only likely to happen if it's obvious at the first glance that the claim was bogus.
This is all you can do to someone filing the notice. Notice doesn't even establish a jurisdiction (and cease-and-desist letter does) - so you can't counter-sue in your jurisdiction to get declaratory judgment that copyright is invalid.
Right. The DMCA was written with the advice of the copyright holders' lawyers (and by them in some cases) and activists and others fought against it as hard as they could.
Even in 1998, the US government was corrupted by money. It's worse today, but this has been happening a long time.
I suspect one could make a case, given the history of the MPA/MPAA that they've left both the realm of "good faith" and "belief" long ago. Each incident doesn't get to occur in a vacuum. You can't claim blissful ignorance forever.
Is there a history of bad faith claims in the courts? I suspect there isn't or at best very limited. It goes like this:
1. MPA sends a notice, content is taken down/disabled
2a) No response to takedown notice is sent, because the next step MPA can take after that is to take you to court. If you win the best case scenario is you recover your legal costs (but not the time). Content stays down.
2b) A response to takedown notice is sent, content gets restored. MPA doesn't go to court, unless it's a slam dunk case or it's important enough to bully someone into submission with legal costs (you pay those out of your pocket with hope of maybe getting most of it back at some point, possibly years later). Victim doesn't go to court for compensation, because it's almost certain that even with a resounding win what they recover is going to be less than legal fees.
The actual number of cases that see the courtroom is likely very, very small.
IANAL but best I can tell it is with regards to filing the takedown notice rather than taking them to court. If it is just the sending of a takedown notice, then holy fuck have they abused it.
Oh, most certainly they have abused it, no question about that.
The problem is if either side folded at notice / notice response step, then that abuse is visible only to platforms that receive those notices, not to the courts.
Could GitHub mount a case on this - that they (MPA) have been making so many of these these bogus 'good faith belief' requests over time that those words don't actually have any meaning anymore to them, and as such have been lying through their teeth when making them now?
I think the assumption is true in this case, that "their clients are invincible / above the law." - they can lobby to create the laws themselves (which is what they did to create the DMCA in the first place) so they are in effect "above the law"
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.
Even more entertaining, the bot has no idea what is or isn't legit. Ages ago I received a take-down from "The Internet Police" ordering me to remove all the Atari game updates from the FTP servers. Thing is, they belonged there. Atari paid us to run parts of their site, including game updates.
You have not met the staff of these orgs. It is actually not exaggeration to say they live in a media bubble where their studio chiefs are captains of industry that are infallible and are to be served with total fealty.
I once sat in a meeting where some VP at a major client asked (because they were technically daft) if it was possible -in not so many words- DDOS google because "they (google) have all this infringing content on their site"
I had to tell me boss "is anyone going to explain to that guy that what he's describing is A. not realistic and B. not legal?"
It seems to me that they are deliberately conflating "infringing someone's copyright" and "using to infringe someone's copyright" - there's a difference between "you have my copyrighted code in your github" and "you are providing software that can be used for copying my movie" - the first is what DMCA notices are for, not the second
Your last sentence is not true. The DMCA notice can be used for anything that the DMCA covers. One thing in the DMCA is:
> linking users to an online location containing [...] infringing activity
Extremely broad, but a link to a file sharing site with infringing content is also infringing. The DMCA notice can be used against the site containing the link.
That’s a good question. A strict reading would imply a single one, and would mean that only TPB would be infringing because they’re the ones “linking” to the content (they don’t host it). But it could easily be construed to mean a link to TPB is also infringing.
The problem with the DMCA is that it’s so broadly worded with not enough words defined. What is the definition of “linking”? After a quick skim, I couldn’t find it. Are only hyperlinks (<a> tags) counted? Or are magnet “links” counted (despite not taking you to the content, but telling you the hashes of the content)? There’s no clear answer.
Notice-and-takedown provisions are not just for things that actually infringe copyright, and the "DMCA notice" part may be an extremely easy misclassification of the letter sent to GitHub. More specifically, notice-and-takedown is for user-submitted content that is illegal or tortious to knowingly distribute. Copyrighted content is the main offender here, but there are other categories, especially "anti-circumvention" tools illegal under other provisions of the DMCA.
IANAL, and my limited legal knowledge is not of US law.
However, if you have copyrights which are of vast economic significance, to a very large number of copyrighted works, it seems unlikely that the law would would deprive you of all of that due to your suing someone for infringement. That seems highly disproportionate.
Now, don't get me wrong, I have no sympathies for the MPAA, but are you sure you're not overstating the effect of a "misuse of copyright" finding (regardless of the odds of such a finding being made)?
In Lasercomb v. Reynolds, and Practice Management Information v. American Medical Association the existence of an abusive licensing agreement allowed third parties to simply violate the copyright.
So, assuming misuse of copyright was found, precedent suggests the copyrights that were being misused would be rendered unenforceable.
A case finding that bad faith DMCA take downs amounted to misuse of copyright would be setting a new legal precedent, but, based on the facts in multiple recent DMCA takedowns, such a finding wouldn't be a huge logical leap.
The "copyrights that were being misused" seems to suggest specific copyrights. Is there precedent for voiding the copyright on Millions of works? Or even - multiple works whose individual copyright was not used specifically?
You can’t “counter-sue” for misuse of copyright, nor is it a “normal punishment.” It’s a defence you can use to avoid liability when someone else sues you, and an exceptional one at that [1]. As noted on Wikipedia, the court in Lasercomb [2] made it clear that copyright misuse does not render the copyright permanently unenforceable:
> This holding, of course, is not an invalidation of Lasercomb's copyright. Lasercomb is free to bring a suit for infringement once it has purged itself of the misuse.
Github needs to go on the offensive and begin to take action against fraudulent DMCA notices, including justification to seek damages for these claims.
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.
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.
>> 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.
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
> Microsoft would never do that unless their hands were forced. Too much potential business with them.
The upside of Microsoft's acquisition of GitHub (and the entire strategy that resulted in the acquisition) is that Microsoft has created incentives for themselves to have GitHub being regarded as a truly open platform that you can depend on. Having repositories exposed to flimsy DMCA takedowns is not part of that.
Microsoft, very transparently, wants to make money by being important in how people develop software. If exposure to flimsy takedowns is a part of GitHub, then people will be more motivated to send their money to GitLab, Atlassian's stuff, or a bunch of other options. They have legitimate competition here.
Developer's opinions of GitHub and Microsoft in general may be of more longer term importance to them than the MPAA's opinion of them. I'm not saying that that is definitely the case (maybe they're still getting there), but it's worth acknowledging that Microsoft has legitimate actual cold money reasons to fight this. No need to rely only on personal convictions of the people at GitHub.
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).
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.
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.
Depends on how you do it. Of course if you want to move instantly then that's gonna be hard. But slowly moving isn't that bad, or creating new projects somewhere else and slowly porting old ones.
Even then, it's possible that just companies that planned to buy GHE will simply not buy it and use something open source instead.
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.
I'm anxiously waiting for a quit-GitHub movement. I hold my source code there because of its popularity and "defaultish" nature. Of course I can go someplace else right now, but then people won't find my software.
The occasional prominent developer has left GitHub for GitLab, but it hasn’t made much of a difference. I don’t see organizations moving off GitHub if they’re already using it. I think GitHub is independent enough from Microsoft that the two could take different stances on these disputes. Certainly I’d expect a DMCA takedown of content on a Microsoft service like OneDrive to be ultimately handled differently from a takedown aimed at source code on GitHub...
Thankfully I am not yet required to sign on to github using 2FA that can only be confirmed on a Zune. Microsoft has been pretty good at leveraging github for the publicity of supporting developers (hosting informational streams and the like) while leaving the platform pretty independent.
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft viewed Github like McDonalds views the Ronald McDonald House - a long term PR investment that's well worth the marginal cost.
Except that Facebook has been integrating their sign on service into various acquisitions - using Zune (or any hardware) was quite hyperbolic of me. For a more even handed comparison: I'm not required to use a Live login to authorize with github.
I'm a bit doubtful of this. It's possible but Microsoft uses Live for both business and gaming, but they've only had a track record of forcing Live account adoption onto users in the gaming sphere. It may happen, sure, but I don't think it's likely.
That all said I didn't think it was likely that Minecraft would switch over to using Live accounts since Minecraft is so famously cross platform and Live accounts have struggled with that in the past.
They're also boiling the frog on Windows local accounts at the moment. It's no longer possible to set up a new install of Home, or Windows 10 (any SKU) in S mode with a local account without either disconnecting internet during installation or going back and converting to a local account after
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".
Deep pockets are only useful as a proxy for getting people to vote. What means more than deep packets is votes. If we can bring in votes that is far more powerful than money.
So get out there and convince voters that this is an important topic. The law will change fast if congress decides that not changing it will mean they are thrown out and some other person who will replaces them. So long as they think few people care it will get lib service. (also so long as there seem to be a signification amount of people on the other side nothing will change)
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.
> and recently voted for the CARES act, which transferred huge amounts of wealth to large corporations.
That was a payroll support program like every other country did, plus airline bailouts which were good because they have giant union contracts.
CARES is the greatest anti-poverty measure the US has done in a hundred years and probably the largest downward transfer of wealth in the world. You didn't notice because all left-wing commentators decided to lie about it ("we only got $1200 checks") instead of reading about how the unemployment benefit worked.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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").
>A better way would be to start excluding MPA and their behaviour in our open source licenses.
This is a remarkably good idea. Add an explicit clause to major open source project licenses that disallow use by the MPAA and similar groups, along with enough explicit damages spelled out to give it teeth.
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.
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]
>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?
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).
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.
"""
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”)
"""
This site is mainly used to share Japanese media. The streaming services have really dropped the ball in this area. They either don't simulcast to other parts of the world (netflix), offer terrible subtitles that are worse than fan translations (netflix, crunchyroll), or just plain never release content for international audiences.
I pay for every relevant streaming service I can, and even when I can access legal, official distributions, I still generally prefer fan releases. It's embarrassing.
I'm so tired of the rent seeking in the entertainment industry. I want to pay artists and content creators, not an ever growing pile of mediocre middlemen and their lawyers. How can we pool our money to hire lobbyists and change the landscape of this industry?
Yeah, I subscribe to Crunchyroll, Netflix, Prime Video, and Funimation. Or in other words, 100% of services with streaming anime available in my country. To be fair, seasonal anime gets a good coverage with those. Netflix's player is pretty good, but the rest vary from meh to awful (I have never successfully changed the timestamp in Funimation's player without playback crashing within the next minute).
But back catalogues availability is not so good. Crunchyroll and Netflix have the most popular stuff like Naruto, Code Geass or Evangelion but literally nobody has, say, The Devil is a Part Timer in my country.
Movies? The SAO movie got a physical showing in my country, the Made in Abyss movie actually did show up on a pay per view non-region locked streaming service and... that's literally it.
Soundtracks? It might be on Spotify. This week. But maybe not next week. I've no fucking idea, but the constant appearence and disappearence of soundtrack songs from my playlists has even caused me to stop moving spotify.
So for movies and back catalogues, my only "legal" option is to ship DVDs/Blurays and a region locked player from the US, or maybe sometimes I can get stuff from the UK in my own region. For soundtracks, even that is not usually an option. Does that legally entitle me to pirate it? No. Do I care? Not really, I feel I've tried my best
Made in Abyss Movie 3: Dawn of the Deep Soul was released on eventive so that you could stream it, as a result of COVID-19. Without COVID-19, I'm pretty sure it wouldn't have landed on there, since it was primarily a substitution for going to actual in-person screenings, which were cancelled in April 2020.
> This site is mainly used to share Japanese media.
In fact, non-CJK media is explicitly prohibited by its terms.
So it's a bit strange to see the MPAA making the takedown and mentioning their biggest members (all Hollywood) in the press release. I suppose the US subsidiaries or partners of certain Japanese media companies might be members of the MPAA?
EDIT: Ah right, one of the companies named is Sony Pictures, which owns a US anime distributor (Funimation).
>(Also you can't judge a translation unless you speak Japanese.)
That may be part of the problem with the industry. The average viewer is none the wiser, so the translation industry gets to make a subpar product and get away with it. If it wasn't for fansubs, they'd have a monopoly. Thankfully, the industry has spent the last 10+ years competing with fan subs instead of outright trying to nuke them and it shows. Subs (and dubs) were far far worse not that long ago.
Ironically or perhaps paradoxically, as professional made dubs and subs have increased in quality fansubs have decreased in quality. It's almost like fansubs are giving the industry a push forward.
The current pro translators have learned from the fansubbers and often use the same tools; some even are former fansubbers.
Thus they've largely kicked fanmade speedsubs out of the "market".
The fansub quantity, for sure, has decreased, but not the quality. Speedsubs are no longer a concern for fansubbing these days.
Meanwhile, the remaining fansubbers are competing by maximizing quality, with features such as singable song translations and full sign typesetting. But you end up with up to weeklong delays between airing and fansub release.
As far as purely translation quality goes, pro translations are much better than they used to be, but speaking as an amateur translator myself I always think it's good for the viewer to have alternative interpretations for more difficult-to-translate passages.
>The fansub quantity, for sure, has decreased, but not the quality. Speedsubs are no longer a concern for fansubbing these days.
That's exactly why the quality has gone down, due to these speed subs. Back in the day speed subs were not a thing. They popped up when legal subs started popping up, almost as a way to compete.
I think the first big name speed sub group was horriblesubs, and they still exist today. Today fansubs are dominated by these groups. They're quality is okay to good. Sometimes they're the only option now, so I'd say the quality has gone down.
Back in the 4:3 days when anime was vbr and sources were interlaced fansub groups would go through frame by frame doing pulldown and denoising. It was amazing. They'd have high quality karaoke in the opening and ending scenes. When's the last time you've seen high quality karaoke on fansubs?
No, quality has gone down. They don't even do color correction today. Maybe in the last 3 years or so fansub quality has gone up a bit, but it's not a lot.. not enough for me to notice much.
>speaking as an amateur translator myself I always think it's good for the viewer to have alternative interpretations for more difficult-to-translate passages.
Yah. You don't often see translation notes any more either.
I'm not sure if I'd count Horriblesubs as speedsubs. They didn't make their own subs, they just ripped the official subs (which is why they called them horrible). The group shut down a few months ago.
I'm talking about speedsubs as something distinct from rips of professional simulcasts; I don't consider those fansubs at all.
Real fansub groups used to compete to be the first to release their translations, so you wouldn't have translation checks or as many editing passes.
Nowadays, the simulcasts (and the rips thereof) are faster than any speedsub could possibly be, so the remaining fansubbers definitely put more effort into quality.
> Back in the 4:3 days when anime was vbr and sources were interlaced fansub groups would go through frame by frame doing pulldown and denoising. It was amazing.
You don't need to do denoising and deinterlacing these days, so... I'm not sure why you think things were better back then? Nowadays encoders are more concerned about banding in particular, so they may specifically add noise on a scene-by-scene basis.
> When's the last time you've seen high quality karaoke on fansubs?
If you get actual fansubs these days instead of simulcast rips, you'll find they have high quality karaoke. I particularly remember the Railgun S karaoke which had realistic-looking lightning striking each syllable. And more recently, you may find the English translations have been worded so that you can sing along in time with the original song.
> You don't often see translation notes any more either.
If you're talking about TL notes in the subtitles themselves, they really went out of style. Nobody wants to be the next "Translator's note: keikaku means plan".
> If you get actual fansubs these days instead of simulcast rips, you'll find they have high quality karaoke. I particularly remember the Railgun S karaoke which had realistic-looking lightning striking each syllable. And more recently, you may find the English translations have been worded so that you can sing along in time with the original song.
I think we're a bit late to be calling Railgun S "these days" these days...
I see. I never downloaded these speedsubs nor knew they existed, because I had a choice. I could download high quality content, which I did. Back then I was never forced into crappy subs.
Today options are limited for many different anime, where you get one or more choices and all of them are just okay, not keeping up with the standard a decade+ ago.
At least professional subs today are better than fansubs in the 80s and early to mid 90s.
Well, back then you mostly just wouldn't have heard much at all about most of the kinds of shows which just get an official sub and no fansubber attention.
Venture into the realm of even slightly obscure and you generally have ... zero to one choices of script translation, usually. To this day, even.
Though, it is a bit unfair to take the most popular anime of the decade (by non-japanese watchers) and the highest rated anime of all time (by non-japanese watchers) as an example. I would be worried if there wasn't a quality fansub group covering it.
This was the norm for all anime once upon a time ago.
The coverage of Anime in some countries (such as the US) are a lot better than before though.
Can't speak of translation quality as I don't watch English-sub, but they have no problem with simulcast. As a matter of fact, lots of popular animes released on Nyaa.si nowadays are directly ripped from Crunchyroll/Funimation/etc. TVrips from Japan, which were the main source before, are actually getting rarer and rarer.
I thought GitHub said they were going to assume good faith by the repository and allow it to stay up until a ruling has been decided (as well as funding legal costs), rather than immediately taking it down under the hand of the "rightsholder".
Did I misread their previous statement after the youtube-dl fiasco?
The relevant part of their "youtube-dl is back" post:
> Given the cost to developers of an unwarranted takedown of code, we ensure we have a complete notice before we take action. We distinguish between code that merely can be used in an infringing way and code that is preconfigured to be used a certain way. We also recognize that code can provide access to copyrighted content without violating the law (for example, fair use). In some cases we can keep a project up because the content identified in the takedown notice is not in fact infringing or circumventing a TPM that controls access or copying of copyrighted works.
So basically: no. But they surrounded it with so much fluff that's its easy to misinterpret.
Nothing will change much, as soon as GitHub is still a user-generated content host. They have to follow DMCA safe harbor practice, which is to obey the claim until proven false, in trade with not get sued themselves as a host.
Note that there are various older forks [1] [2] available that allow to verify that the project isn't in fact "preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content". The most 'incriminating' file is "api_uploader_v2.py", which lists categories such as "6_2 - Software - Games". Which is not infringing at all.
While unrealistic, it's technically possible that some of the files have changed (significantly) since June 12 2019, the last commit of [1]. However, it's very unlikely that the database migration file, 2bceb2cb4d7c_add_comment_count_to_torrent.py, would have been changed.
You can still download the zip file of the repository through archive.org.
And there is no direct link (took a quick look) to copyrighted content in the source code. If they shutdown the main site, without a data backup, the code is useless. Users will have to re-upload and re-seed the torrents they have.
Tangentially, I'm interested in the concept of the torrent data moving into something somewhat indestructible by also highly available, such as the bitcoin blockchain. Your torrent site then "mounts" the blockchain, scanning the chain for the torrent data (magnet URIs) necessary to bootstrap a corpus.
I think what you're suggesting is already possible (in a different way) not by using the blockhain, but by crawling bittorrent's DHT.
Either of the solutions, will let seeders and leechers communicate in a decentralized way, but if there is no one with the original files, it won't work.
So, in this case, nyaa facilitates the seeder/leecher communication, but if the main site is shutdown and users who have the files are not willing to seed the torrents again then the source code is useless.
Crawling bittorrent's DHT is mentioned in this paper [1]:
This paper presents two kinds of attacks based on crawl-ing the DHTs used for distributed BitTorrent tracking. First, we show how pirates can use crawling to rebuild BitTorrent search engines just a few hours after they are shut down (crawling for fun). Second, we show how content owners can use related techniques to monitor pi-rates’ behavior in preparation for legal attacks and negate any perceived anonymity of the decentralized BitTorrent architecture (crawling for profit)
What you are describing is sorta already a thing, take a look at sia[0], which is a coin? used to purchase long-term data storage. You can't really scan the chain as far as I understand it but why not host the entire index on sia as well?
I would store the data on the bitcoin chain because there is an enormous amount of value (hundreds of billions of dollars) that hinges on the continued existence of that chain.
As an avid hater of Bitcoin and lover of copyright infringement, I am all for that! It would be great if we could get the MPA and RIAA to kill Bitcoin for us. People would still gamble away their life's savings on other scams, like Amway, slot machines, or Tesla stock, but at least they wouldn't waste gigawatts of electrical power doing it.
1) Bitcoin can be powered by renewable sources of electricity such as solar and it is very cost effective to do so.
2) Bitcoin uses about as much power as New Zealand.
3) The amount of bitcoin mining is 6.25 bitcoins every 10 minutes which halves every few years. The more mining, the less the miners make. If bitcoin had 1/100th as many miners, it would use 1/100th as much energy but still function and work the same. However, it would be 100x more profitable to be a miner and less secure.
4)As the mining rewards halve, we can expect the people willing to mine to halve and the electrical usage to halve.
5) Ethereum is moving away from proof of work to proof of stake in it’s transition to Ethereum 2.0. This will make eth use orders of magnitude less power to the point where as long as you hold 32 Ethereum you could be processing Ethereum transactions from just your mobile phone.
6) Many altcoins are more energy efficient or use their hash power for something useful. Remember Primecoin?
Introduce levy to cover for people copying stuff, then introduce copy protection and anti-circumvention laws so copying becomes illegal. Continue to collect levy. Ingenious.
In the Czech Republic you need to pay this levy on blank media (see point number 1 & 6 on https://www.mkcr.cz/frequently-asked-questions-953.html?lang...) to a shadowy state mandated cartel of "designated rightholders" where the money preaty much disappears from the face of the Earth.
AFAIK there is no way around it, even in professional environment - we build a couple hard drives for a an internal company server and this levy was clearly marked there.
Same thing for all the other extortion money they extract from music festivals, pubs, hotels, radio stations, etc. - they do use some of it to bribe the most prominent and vocal old school artists to basically do advertising for their cause but the rest safely hits their coffers.
This reminded me of the Russian/ROMS/AllOfMp3 saga. That was a service way ahead of its time... Even now it is difficult to find such a good catalogue of music in lossless format.
Some countries including the USA, for those who haven't bothered reading the link.
This is why decades ago you could buy blank CDR media designated for "music" at a slightly higher price. They are identical to "computer" CDRs, but the seller pays a fee to the copyright office.
It shouldn't, and we can't know what was in the offending files because they've been removed.
> For the avoidance of any doubt, we are also providing you with the attached file tilted “GitHub_code_Nyaa” which shows code hosted on GitHub that provides all of the source code, templates, and utility API tools needed to host a copy of the Nyaa.si Bittorrent site, used to access infringing copies of motion pictures and television shows for which Nyaa.si provides torrent files and magnet links for the infringing content that users are looking for. The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
That's the real issue, but again it's hard to discuss since the files have been removed.
The issue is that (supposedly, we can't know because the repo has been taken down) the code was pre-configured to host copyrighted material. From the complaint:
> The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
I don't know if they mean that the code is preconfigured to connect to a torrent network which is known to host copyrighted material, or if there was a host_copyrighted_contet.cfg file, etc. Its hard to know how much they are stretching the truth because the code is gone.
Agreed, that's what I just commented before reading this reply. They are very loose with their words in takedowns. I bet it's probably not as bad as they say, though. Maybe it has a movie/TV API that it uses, thus is "preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content".
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.
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.)
I never saw the repo, but to play devil's advocate it's possible that there's a unit test or something that downloads copyrighted material. That's what got youtube-dl taken down.
The issue with the youtube-dl case was that certain copyrighted video pages did have a different structure, so they needed to test they could parse that page correctly.
There's no technical difference between a torrent containing ArchLinux.iso and TheBeatlesDiscography.zip however.
Not exactly. They had a test that saves a file from YouTube that was "protected" with some tech a lawyer might quality as DRM. YouTube only uses that thing for copyrighted materials.
Torrents don't have anything like that. You don't have to deal with anything copyrighted to test any related stuff, be it client, tracker, or web server.
Those directly downloaded copyrighted youtube videos. It would instead be just a torrent tracker connection check, no reason to even transfer a file, since the tracker just matches user with user and doesn't touch any files.
I'm just saying that if a unit test existed, that's likely not what would cause the DMCA. seems that the reason is that it's preconfigured to share copyrighted content, so like I said, not the unit tests.
Torrent trackers are responsible to introduce Peers to each other who are downloading/uploading the same files[torrent].
Its basically the backbone of torrent.
say for example, you have a torrent file or a magnet link. And you start downloading the file using client application, it will go to known trackers and ask them the address of peers who are uploading the file based on unique hash of it. Torrent breaks files in the chunks with size of few MB referred as pieces, Tracker will get the current status of downloaded and remaining chunks from you and give you the list of peers with same file available, at same time it will register your address for the other new peers to connect.
now connecting peers have knowledge of one anther's address they will share pieces to others and download remaining from other peers to complete the download.
so, basically peer is backbone of system, its a tool which can have multiple use legal or not, one cannot simply call its source code violating the IPs, that's just an absurd argument.
And neither does it violate any similar law (because not many people know, but the DMCA is not an idea from the US, just barely the US implementation of the 1996 WIPO treaty), in the European Union or anywhere else.
So it really, isn't illegal anywhere (well except obviously authoritarian regimes).
Technically, the code is alleged to violate copyright, not DMCA. A DMCA notice is just the process that copyright owners use to tell service providers about allegedly infringing content.
The argument is for contributory copyright infringement via inducement, ala MGM v Grokster 545 U.S. 913 (2005) or Columbia Pictures Industries, Inc. v. Fung 710 F.3d 1020 (9th Cir. 2013), the isoHunt case. Inducement occurs where someone distributes a device with the intent of promoting infringement and actual infringement occurs. Here, the argument is that nyaa intends to promote copyright infringement because it provides a tool that is tailored for copyright infringement. The notice letter cites various references in the code to nyaa.si. Exhibit A of the letter comprises "a series of screenshots taken from the Nyaa.si website for the Project that include images of copyrighted works available through the Project." The implication here is that the devs here are encouraging similar use of the code for infringing copyright.
I'm not saying I agree with it, but that's their argument.
Based on the way certain files are listed in the complaint I suspect this is something along the lines of what happened with youtube-dl where there's some part of the test suite, some example, or even some comment in the code that refers to a copyrighted work.
With the repo down I obviously can't verify this hypothesis but it fits.
>by virtue of the operation and further development of the Bittorrent website Nyaa.si’s “nyaa” repository (the “Project”)
Basically the fact that the world's most predominant installation of the site (Nyaa.si) is serving a whole bunch of copyrighted materials through torrents makes the code itself violate DMCA.
By name it wouldn't but they link to several files where the "offending code" resides, so if they're using examples where someone is downloading a movie then that would prompt for a DMCA.
> Specifically, at the URL, the Repository hosts and offers for download the Project, which, when downloaded, provides the downloader everything necessary to launch and host a “clone” infringing website identical to Nyaa.si (and, thus, engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows).
This is not a generic BitTorrent tracker. This is source code for duplicating the nyaa.si website (which in the github source code, they state is "A BitTorrent community focused on Eastern Asian media including anime, manga, music, and more" [1]).
I think it would be a stretch to say you are interested in this source code so you could then rip out large pieces of it to host your Linux ISO's on...
I agree that some DMCA crosses the line. But in this case, I don't see a legitimate use for this source code other than enabling copyright infringement.
It's a torrent index with search, categories, user management and so on. I don't see how I can't use this for hosting Linux ISOs by just renaming the categories.
You could use it, but would it be the most natural thing for you? Or are there better tools for that task? The nyaa source code includes features and organization specifically for the anime/manga scene.
For example, there is torrent classification to detect whether the torrent contains an entire series, which subtitles it contains, whether it is a reencode/remux/scene release, etc [1]. Would that be useful for you to host legitimate content (which typically is not reencoded/remuxed/fansubbed)?
I am all for criticizing the chilling effects if the DMCA was targeting the DMCA protocol in any way. But in this case, it is targeting the source code for a CLEARLY illegal website (illegal, in this case, based on the jurisdiction in which github operates and is bound to)
> Specifically, we request that you remove or disable access to the infringing Project’s repositories referenced herein in accordance with either 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(ii) (DMCA “representative list” provision), 17 U.S.C. § 512(i)(1)(A) (DMCA “repeat infringer” provision), and/or GitHub’s Terms of Service, which prohibit use of your facilities for copyright infringement, ...
So such dual-use technologies are now under pressure. This is quite a step towards banning certain mass-dissemination protocols in general. See "inducement rule" [1] in the US.
The title is misleading. This isn't some generic torrent tracker. The repo in question is the source of a specific site - nyaa.si [0] which according to the complaint is preconfigured to share copyrighted material:
> The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
This is probably what makes this complaint possible.
> This is probably what makes this complaint possible.
What makes this complaint possible is that the MPA blatantly expands the scope of copyright, counting on their large legal budget and the skewed possible consequences to discourage people from fighting back.
The MPA doesn't care whether this repo actually infringes on their copyright, nor whether the DMCA allows them to issue a takedown request. They only care that this will hurt people who oppose their interests and that there is little practical recourse.
Please don't, however, baselessly propagate their claims. As far as I can tell it's bullshit. The source code may be for nyaa.si but it just contains normal torrent tracker code.
Why did they pick the search entry XML for the porn section??? (I can only assume their lawyers have no idea what 'sukebei' means.) Anyway, nothing interesting in this file either.
They DCMA doesn't say that the repo was used to host copyrighted material:
>The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
They are basically saying "this is the codebase for nyaa.si, and as proof here are a bunch of files that prove that assertion". What I don't understand is the legal grounds they have to compel GitHub to remove the repository. It would be like if I removed ffmpeg from github because freestreams.tv was using it to power their backend.
I understand that, but those files do not show that the repo is preconfigured to host copyrighted files. I don't get what the search XML or database migration is supposed to prove for example.
All they have demonstrated is that it is the source code for nyaa.si. I don't get how that is enough to do anything.
I'd say that first one (api_info) is semi-plausible in terms of being "configured" for piracy, in that it hard codes the production API of the site, and I assume the data accessible therein is largely piracy.
It is also true that one would need to modify quite a few places to make this codebase sensibly usable for anything non-piracy. Even if an Anime studio decided to make their back catalog available over torrent (for some reason), this site really is not designed for their needs.
However, I strongly suspect this list of files is roughly the set that have 'nyaa' as a stand alone word (i.e. not part of a snake case word or other compound). I suspect they loaded the code into a search engine, and searched for "nyaa.si", and flagged all results. Many search engines will treat the '.' like a space, will filter out "si" as being too short, and thus search for "nyaa", and only find results for that when it exists as a separate word.
See, I still think that's innocuous since it does not list any particular infringing links. For example, Google has no issues showing us opentrackr.org.
And yet, it is completely absent from the DMCA takedown, which signals to me that they really did no work at all before making this takedown.
a link to a list of trackers it no more illegal than publishing the public street address of a business that sells products that are illegal in certain jurisdictions (texas dildo law, anyone?)
> The Project blatantly infringes the MPA Member Studios’ copyrights and countless other copyrights. Indeed, copyright infringement is so prevalent within the Project that infringement plainly is its predominant use and purpose.
when submitting, and you could argue that does constitute a blanket attack against dual-use products, but the specific allegations you cite are also relevant. Since I could still edit the title I changed it to "for source code of torrent tracker nyaa.si"; hope that's clearer.
Reading the complaint, it's clear their focus is not on generic tracker source code but on copyrighted file metadata being preloaded into the tracker source code:
> The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
I've looked at all the "infringing" files that they link to, from a bundled zip download from the web archive, and I don't see anything that's "preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content".
The most iffy is the list of categories in utils/api_uploader_v2.py but there's no category that doesn't contain works out of copyright or under a license permitting redistribution, and even if that were not the case, that would still not be tantamount to being "preconfigured to find" anything in particular.
There's also the URL of the pirate site, but google also provides it, as do some comments here...
In the defense of the falsely-assuming people the actual legally actionable bits are all the way at the end of the complaint, and the first few paragraphs sound like the MPA is alleging that merely publishing the source code of a BitTorrent tracker is itself infringement.
I swear, it's almost as if the people who work for these publisher trade groups are trying to pull aggro and look crazy.
> The identified files and code are preconfigured to find and provide infringing copies of our Members’ film and tv content to Nyaa.si users in violation of copyright law.
could easily be interpreted as "oh MPA took it down because sharing files = bad", not necessarily "their code is very specificlaly designed to analyze and collect pirated media". The companies behind this are very loose with their wording so it looks terrible.
As someone who worked in that industry for a long time (for BayTSP, which eventually got bought and pulled into Irdeto), the MPA/A is one of the more fervent (and obnoxious clients) we had. Not as dumb as say, Disney or NBC, but still...dedicated since the Valenti days to taking down anything that could event tangentially be related to downloading a movie without "permission"
It's a stupid industry, populated by even more stupid clients.
Well... they already succeeded in screwing some hardware and software this way.
When Windows Vista was about to launch, MPAA pushed hard for DVD copy protection, this resulted in a sudden push against CRT monitors, in favor of then lower quality LCD, to force the usage of HDMI cables (because they have DRM), they also pushed hard for Microsoft to change what soundcards were allowed to do, again because of DRM.
This contributed to a sudden death of CRTs right when some companies were about to have breakthrough in lightweight CRT, and also basically killed the soundcard market... they still exist, but nowhere near important as they were, and nowhere near awesome, the changes that were pushed to support DRM killed 3D Audio, back then you had people buying sound cards as if they were like GPUs but for audio, some games used this to great effect (Thief for example), where the game would raytrace the audio, calculating it reflecting, refracting and difracting around the 3D models, allowing for sound simulations that let players to figure out the environment by audio alone...
Vista came and changed drastically how the driver stack for video and audio worked, MS back then blamed "stability" but they killed hard anything that could be used to circunvent DVD, HDMI and related DRM.
> were about to have breakthrough in lightweight CRT
Never heard of this. There's a limit on how lightweight a CRT can be, compared to what amounts to essentially a large chip. Maybe that wasn't so bad. Also, unless this breakthrough no longer used an electron gun, they are power hogs.
> to force the usage of HDMI cables
What's preventing one from driving a CRT with a HDMI signal? You can generate the analog signals the CRT needs quite easily. This is in fact done by dirt cheap dongles today.
> where the game would raytrace the audio, calculating it reflecting, refracting and difracting around the 3D models, allowing for sound simulations that let players to figure out the environment by audio alone
Why can't we do this today? This can in fact be done by GPUs. Possibly even in the CPU.
The way I understand there are a few reasons why people stopped buying sound cards:
* Capabilities such as MIDI and pre-loaded instruments were no longer used. Games had more space to burn so they just used digitized waveforms
* The built-in audio became "good enough". Any built-in cheap can output audio at high sample rates. Decent audio can be provided even from the analog outputs, not to mention digital signals carried by optical outputs, HDMI, Display Port. Some of these may not even be routed through the audio card
* Similarly, many people use USB headsets. They have their own audio device. In fact, many computers have multiple - in my case, my camera has one, the Oculus has another, so does the monitor. All through USB or DisplayPort
* Most sound processing tasks are not really that taxing on a modern system. Thief might be an exception and even then, given some AMD and NVidia offerings, this is probably doable without dedicated audio processing hardware
* Also Creative had a chokehold on the industry as a whole. Lots of libraries and products were purchased or killed. They still make audio cards today, but I can't understand why.
SED. Patent bullshit killed it off, Canon decided to end the project instead of producing what could have been the greatest display technology of all time.
Microsoft removed all capabilities of user software to directly interface with audio hardware, MS at the time officially blamed BSoDs that were caused by soundcards, but this change also made very hard to write software that could circunvent audio DRM (ie: when you had total access to soundcard hardware, it was easy to write a program to just stream to disk whatever the soundcard calculated, before it encoded the HDMI DRM on the output).
The new "driver API" for soundcards was extremely limited, basically you could tell windows some details of your hardware, and software could ask windows to do certain tasks, like raise volume, lower volume, etc... any Windows game since that has their own 3D audio, is done by the game itself calculating the audio, and asking Windows to play that audio.
But when you could tinker with the hardware directly, you could build audio processors that would take as inputs some audio samples, then 3D models, material definitions, and then raytrace (in way almost identical to video, since light is also wave, thus same rules apply, this also mean it has same computational expense) the results, then you could play on the speakers the result.
If the user had multiple speakers, he could explain to the soundcard where they are physically in his RL room, then the soudncard could act as if each speaker was a "camera" in the 3D world, and raytrace how the audio would act, for example suppose the player was underwater in a pool room, and there was a loud explosion outside, the game would figure out the sound would reflect on the hallway corridors, reach the door, difract, reach the water, refract, and reach the player.
One way of doing so was EAX from Creative, but OpenAL also worked too, it even intentionally had API at the time simialr to OpenGL, so it a graphics coder would feel confortable also coding the 3D audio, Doom3 for example supports OpenAL 3D audio.
As for the high-tech CRT, DiabloD3 awnser is accurate, there was also Sony's "Field Emission" tech too.
And no, analog signals are not easy to generate, the "dirt cheap dongles" or aren't cheap (good converters from digital to analog are often in the 50 USD+ range having good proper RAMDACs) or are crap and can't do high-res high-refresh rate, and might struggle with colour, in analog era some crazy stuff regarding colours were possible, for example SGI sold a videocard that could output the analog data to display image files that had 48 bits per pixel, one of its purposes was HDR photo editing, "cheap dongles" absolutely can't do that.
We're still getting people used to the idea of "phones" in beautiful and "safe" walled gardens. (We all know that "phones" aren't actually personal computers so it's not like we're giving anything up!)
It's easier to control infringing uses of technology in the walled garden, where the imprimatur of the "gardener" reigns supreme and software can be sent down the memory hole if it angers the establishment.
If this goes according to plan nobody (at least, nobody who isn't part of an aged and miniscule market segment) will notice when the personal computers are brought into the "safety" of the garden too.
warning us that entities really are going to try exactly that bullshit. And, as usual, sounding paranoid at the time and "oh, yeah, of course that happened" later.
A lot people on HN probably weren't alive to know that this happened. It would do people well to read the testimony given before a subcommittee of the House of Representatives back in 1983[1] to get some idea of exactly how willing and eager to destroy innovation copyright maximalists really are.
Nothing suggests the attitudes motivating the MPAA's lack of foresight re: the VCR in 1983, aand their general unwillingness to allow anything to upset the status quo, have gone anywhere in the ensuing decades.
For those who don't know nyaa.si: it's probably the most popular public tracker for anime/manga/and related stuff. It sprung up not so long ago after the original nyaa.eu (? I'm not 100% sure on the domain) shut down. Today it's not the only surviving clone, but probably the biggest one.
I'm still not sure however, how the repo itself violates copyright. Yes I'm aware of the explanations but I have a hard time believing it. And I can't exactly look up the linked code files.
Torrents were great threat in past years, but now in world with streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime,Hulu and all others torrent is not a serious threat.
So,that's a baseless argument, Its like don't sell knives they can be used to murder.
Torrents are also useful for many others purposes, like distribution of big opensource software, downloading files with unreliable connection and slow speed, to distribute things [kind of]anonymously peer-peer etc.
A music colossus already tried this, and Tidal landed with a thud.
People are loyal to artists, not labels, and artists change labels on a fairly regular basis. It's not like TV where shows generally live and die on a single channel, and maybe get salvaged onto a second one.
And if not loyal to an artist it is a genera or station. Classical music listeners can get Bach from a number of different artists, if a few are missing they typically can get by with the others. If someone puts a station on Pandora it will be a long time before they notice that something is missing.
With TV there is a long standing character development to get people interested in something in particular. With music you often just want a style - though there are favorites with particular meaning that you may want.
Even loyalty to an artist is overrated. Tidal had exclusivity with some of the biggest names in music with dedicated fanbases and this mostly got people to sign up for the one-month free trial and cancel.
Beyonce and Jay-Z moved back onto Spotify. This is a model that is proven not to work.
To be fair, there is also a difference between streaming shows and music.
For shows, I sit on my couch and either open Netflix or Prime Video, and then start the show I'm going to be watching the next hour.
For music, I have Spotify playlists for different moods/genres. If a specific song/artist is not on Spotify, too bad, but I'm not going to stop cooking, wash my hands, go to my phone to switch apps, go back to cooking, stop again in 10 mins. to go back to Spotify
Maybe unpopular opinion: you don't need to pay for 10 distinct services at the same time. Like, there's a show that I want to watch on Crave, I pay for a month and watch it - along with other stuff that might interest me. Then there's something else on Starz - I do the same.
2 concurrent streaming service is good enough for most people, I think, specially considering most streaming services add full seasons at once, instead of weekly episodes. And even in that case, you can just wait a couple months until the whole show is available, and spend 10 bucks for a month's subscription.
It definitely adds some friction though. At least for me, I would probably just ignore, say, new Disney+ content rather than try and go through a whole setup and cancellation process. It might be annoying. I might forget. There is a reason why "see what subscriptions you're actually using" is a frequent first step in programs to rein in your personal finance.
A few years ago, I would have agreed. However nowadays I can't even list the SVoD offerings in my country, and last time I searched (or was Stargate SG1), I couldn't find any offering. (One SVoD has it... Only seasons 8 and 9).
We were watching Harry Potter around new year and it vanished off of Netflix on first of January. As long as that keeps happening torrents are going to be superior to streaming services.
I've made a cool app that consumes yts api a while ago. Naively I even shared it here. After learning that someone in England was arrested only for having links to pirated movies I took everything down.
It's a shame how hard they are coming after torrents and copyright content like that. As I kid growing up in Brazil I wouldn't have access to a lot of movies, games and tv shows if weren't for torrents and pirate content. Now a days I can buy these games and pay for a subscription to movies and tv shows, but I learned of them by downloading first.
I wonder how much it hurts a tv show like GOT to have some kid watching it without buying.
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.
While I am against DMCAs I find it amusing to be honest, it is kinda like karma. The nyaa.si people commonly engaged in censorship of their issue tracker at github (even if all parties were polite and the issue was closed they ended up locking and deleting issues afterwards). In addition in their early days they engaged in a "fake news" campaign against the other nyaa clone (nyaa.si is a clone of the original nyaa). Finally they never provided their database to the public, so if it dies or if someone wants to make another clone they have to scrape the whole site. (there was a lot of drama when the original nyaa died because nobody had an updated database and they had to work with an outdated one. The other nyaa clone offered a copy of its database. When I asked one of the members of nyaa.si I was offered a pathetic excuse on how it would be too hard to write an sql query).
And to be honest the nyaa.si devs would not care about this whole thing at all. They admitted that they published the code to github because they were tired of the "foss nerds" whining.
It would be great if the code for GitHub was on GitHub so that people could host their own.
How far are we removed from: “please remove this book on C++, as individuals may learn how to pirate music from Britney Spears using the knowledge herein”
From the complaint it sounds like this repository doesn't just contain the code of a tracker, but also of a torrent search/indexing site (similar to the pirate bay website). The urls listed as infringing seem mostly be related to this website, not a tracker.
I think the argument is that nyaa.si is clearly designed for piracy, and the code is specific to that website evidenced by its url being embedded all over the codebase.
The real WTF here is why a torrent site is hosting its source on a site like github in the first place. We all know that societies like the MPA flagrantly abuse the law because there are little repercussions. The codebase really should have been selfhosted.
GitHub blindly taking down another repo after another dumb DMCA complaint is just giving me the last push to migrate my projects to a self-hosted Gitlab instance.
I've first thought of it after the youtube-dl takedown, and decided to schedule the migration after the company fired a jew employee who called the Capitol Hill protestors Nazis, but I admit that I've got a bit lazy in the meantime.
Thanks GitHub for reminding me that I shouldn't be this lazy and I should move my software ASAP to a safe home where I don't have to worry about my code disappearing from the web overnight because of a dumb lawyer who has no clue of what he's talking about when he talks about tech.
When open-source developers get pissed of how you treat their projects (most of them developed and maintained for free) they don't come down to the streets, they don't take you to courts, they don't harass your employees. They just move their projects somewhere else, update the URLs provided online, and go on with their lives as if nothing happened. And we all know that GitHub without projects and without developers is nothing but a shiny empty box. I wish you guys enjoy your shiny empty box soon - maybe ask one of those lawyers to contribute some code to it.
>Indeed, copyright infringement is so prevalent within the Project that infringement plainly is its predominant use and purpose.
Directly from the claim. If they can ban a torrent index (I don't know if there's actual tracker code in the project) for it being predominantly used for piracy, why not a torrent client?
That's extreme and violent. We can do better than this.
As someone who makes money selling software, I think we should abolish copyright and let these companies give contracts to their users which bind them not to share the songs and movies they bought.
Then it's up to the company to report when actual violation is occurring and bring, in a fair court case, whether a certain user shared the material or not, breaching their contract with the company.
If you access material shared breaching a contract you're not doing anything illegal.
If you're selling passively too many copies that enforcing all these contracts is too problematic or expensive, you can consider it a natural market tax on the huge profits you're making.
We shouldn't give shortcuts for companies to enforce their copyright, they have this problem specifically because they are the richest 1%.
What do you mean by “show strong opposition but using civil and democratic means”? Give me that, and I'll show you millions who can't, or that it isn't effective, or rejoice and change the world.
- engage in discussions
- speak up against injustices
- vote
- join groups of like-minded people
- exercise your right to demonstrate
Change is hard, and it is slow. That is usually not a bad thing; however, it requires persistence.
I'm currently stuck in Germany. Think about the late 80s when a whole state was brought down peacefully by the people of the German Democratic Republic. It was not a storm on the Reichstag that brought about the fall of the state, nor a military coup. It was a lot of different factors combined but an increasing pressure from the people played a central role in it. And, mind you, this was a regime that had no problem taking extreme measures against its own people, so certainly no easy circumstances to stand up against the authorities.
I understand that you want to prove a point and stick to your position, but in all honesty, I don't find your claim convincing.
People in the US cannot engage in discussions? You need to have political power to speak up against injustices? 98.5% of the US population has not been disenfranchised in 2020. Obviously, joining groups of like-minded people requires such groups to exist, but in the age of social media, they don't have to be physically around you any more.
I mean, without a doubt every single one of your points is true and applicable in some cases, but for the vast majority of people there is absolutely no problem doing any of the examples I listed.
Let's not forget our context here: the OP suggested deadly violence against "rentseekers", and I countered that more civil acts should be taken. I sure hope that despite your arguments above, you'd still be on my side in that question.
The first and fourth require like-minded people around you. The second requires some measure of personal political power. The last one requires both. The third requires you not to have been disenfranchised.
There are many people in the US who can't do any of those. I'm not sure how that compares to East Germany, since I have lived in neither country.
GitHub is Microsoft, right? Well, let them fight I say. Microsoft can simply say "no" automatically to all this bullshit (well, a generic lawyer "no" response) that will automatically get sent back. Good luck for one automation crap to fight with another automation crap - or like someone else said in this thread, this is Garbage In Garbage Out.
I'd like for Motion Picture Association to publish a step-by-step guide on how I can engage in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows using this piece of software.
Because I imagine at some point in the guide they'd tell me to generate torrent files of copyrighted files I have and upload them to the site, which is really outside of this project.
Or is Nginx also infringing because when downloaded, it allows me to start engaging in massive infringement of copyrighted motion pictures and television shows by enabling directory indexing and uploading MP4s?