It's important to remember that these projects are not violating copyright law, are not circumvention tools, and that filing a DMCA notice against them is in fact unlawful.
Sadly, you're mostly right and the comments section saying to find a pro-bono lawyer is laughable. I think anyone who believes that exists should actually reach out to a real lawyer and see how that conversation goes. I've had those conversations.
Firstly, they can't exist most of the time you can't actually call a lawyer and talk to them - you get their office and their "job" is to gatekeep that lawyer from making any discussions with anyone who isn't represented or paid for a consultation.
Secondly, once you do get into contact with them you'll get a blank stare or phone silence. This is not how most lawyers view pro-bono work. Most of them have a very small quota of pro-bono work to be done and that's it. They get assigned a case by their firm or go and accept a few a year from the state and they're done with it. The idea that an altruistic lawyer exists out there ready to do free and unpaid work is virtually non-existent today.
Both should be done. Often the actual illegally hosted materials are on servers not friendly with takedown requests or will get immediately reloaded by the pirates. By going after the links it can cut off the ability for people to find the illegally hosted materials.
Seems like a strange way to attempt to police the internet by proxy. The Internet should ignore or route around people attempting to police how nodes connect to each other.
Wait a second... By the view you're espousing right now, doesn't that make this conversation "illegal"? Why aren't we filing DMCA takedowns to HN because the list of the naughty sites is at the top of the page for this very thread?
In this case the files you could view on github literally had links directly to copyrighted works. It was not just that it was compatible with pirate sites.
It's exciting to me recently with the increase in copyright abuse and AI blurring the lines that more people are going to be involved with decentralized systems.
There have been multiple different ways to host git repositories over DHT networks such as BitTorrent. Similarly there have been ways to run DHT backed commands for Linux package managers like apt.
These tools often receive little praise because the value of decentralized systems seems low when centralized systems are working to most users without too many issues.
The enshittification is ramping up so quickly recently that more people are reaching out to me on how to setup Linux syatems, home media servers, etc. I genuinely enjoy these technologies, but for the last decade I had more or less just shut up about them to avoid being that guy.
I was actually just wondering if torrents were the way to go.
I don't have any experience with github so not sure if torrents are at all suitable but I always had the thought that they were decentralized so once released hard to stop as long as someone has a copy.
Germany and the EU will probably kowtow to the US if the DMCA requests or lawsuits are brought by big enough players.
Big money interests rub shoulders with US politicians, US politicians deal with their overseas counterparts. Therefore, big enough DMCA requests will be mentioned behind closed doors in the same breath as international trade and other geopolitical concerns. Money protects money in deals between close enough friends and allies.
If Codeberg were based in Russia or a US geopolitical adversary, on the other hand, such requests would likely be ignored.
Moving to a Germany based host of all places, after being legally harassed over copyright, doesn't strike me as a particularly good idea. Aren't the local courts infamous for being awful to deal with?
I would like to caution readers against visiting the sites that have the banned extractors listed for them. I did that and was visually accosted by cartoon pornography of young girls who look like children.
It seems that this is a legal kerfuffle over a pornography downloader for pedophiles.
Firstly, they can't exist most of the time you can't actually call a lawyer and talk to them - you get their office and their "job" is to gatekeep that lawyer from making any discussions with anyone who isn't represented or paid for a consultation.
Secondly, once you do get into contact with them you'll get a blank stare or phone silence. This is not how most lawyers view pro-bono work. Most of them have a very small quota of pro-bono work to be done and that's it. They get assigned a case by their firm or go and accept a few a year from the state and they're done with it. The idea that an altruistic lawyer exists out there ready to do free and unpaid work is virtually non-existent today.
This seems like turtles all the way down.
There have been multiple different ways to host git repositories over DHT networks such as BitTorrent. Similarly there have been ways to run DHT backed commands for Linux package managers like apt.
These tools often receive little praise because the value of decentralized systems seems low when centralized systems are working to most users without too many issues.
The enshittification is ramping up so quickly recently that more people are reaching out to me on how to setup Linux syatems, home media servers, etc. I genuinely enjoy these technologies, but for the last decade I had more or less just shut up about them to avoid being that guy.
Maybe there are more recent examples?
Big money interests rub shoulders with US politicians, US politicians deal with their overseas counterparts. Therefore, big enough DMCA requests will be mentioned behind closed doors in the same breath as international trade and other geopolitical concerns. Money protects money in deals between close enough friends and allies.
If Codeberg were based in Russia or a US geopolitical adversary, on the other hand, such requests would likely be ignored.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fakku#History
It seems that this is a legal kerfuffle over a pornography downloader for pedophiles.