Replies: 24 comments 75 replies
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That's fucking horseshit. Not only there is no circumvention of anything going on here, I know for sure that at least some of the listed sites already remove content in response to fakku dmca. There is no fakku content on there.
+1. Codeberg maybe? |
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Platform recommendation: tangled (tangled.org) |
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agree with thatfuckingbird. their secondary liability argument is weak, but not legally baseless. your options might be limited to: fully comply (and set a precedent), partially comply by removing only the specifically named extractors (which arent core and could be moved elsewhere, and may be enough to satisfy github), file a counter-notice (which carries legal risk), or migrate off gitgub (eg. to codeberg) |
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unfortunately i don't think removing only the named ones is a good idea considering they also list hentaifoundry which afaik is a site for users to post their own art and is certainly not a piracy site. considering how well they "researched" this, it's plausible they could keep sending such bogus notices for basically any site in the future |
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i dont think the hf claim is legally sound but that doesnt invalidate the notice. dmca only requires a good faith belief. not a honest one. even a poorly researched notice can enforce action. from github, removing the specifically listed items might resolve the notice without validating the broader claim. that said, i do agree there is risk if a renewed claim appears later. github might then feel required to act immediately rather than offering another 24 hour window. that window is a courtesy and voluntary. dmca actually requires expeditious removal so github isnt required to give 24 hours to quickly edit. if fakku renews with another (broader) claim github might just disable the repo and/or account outright to protect the safe harbor. so partial compliance could work, but its certainly no guarantee against a round two. |
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"Supports dozens of hentai/doujinshi sites" isn't very specific and, as I've said, I really do not want to rewrite this entire repo's
According to their email, the windows here is 7 days. Maybe because this whole thing is rather big and involves 28 other repos as well like |
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Currently migrating this repo to Codeberg, just in case: https://codeberg.org/mikf/gallery-dl |
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(tried 5 times) |
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The repository is now mirrored on codeberg and gitlab. Issues and PRs are copied to the Gitlab mirror. I couldn't get it to work on Codeberg, though. I've also saved a complete GitHub migration archive of this repository, including issues, PRs, discussions, tags, basically everything. On a side note: the archive without releases is ~250MB, with release binaries it is 6GB. |
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So the archive is the same as before the newest update? |
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It was. I've now updated the Codeberg and GitLab repos with the same commits as have been pushed to GitHub since the DCMA, so they contain all original commits and extractors plus the most recent ones. |
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If you have insurance that covers the legal grounds of copyright, use that. |
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But knowing where you are from, a DMCA counter notice might be not advisable. But only a DMCA counter notice will remove the DMCA takedown on github. Up to you how you want to handle it. |
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Here is a suggested draft response mail provided by Copilot in a neutral and factual style Subject: Clarification Regarding DMCA §1201 Anti-Circumvention Notice Hello GitHub Support Team, Thank you for forwarding the recent DMCA §1201 anti-circumvention notice. I would like to provide some factual clarification about the repository in question so that the situation is accurately understood. 1. The repository does not interact with or access the complainant’s platform or technological protection measures. 2. The repository does not circumvent any access-control or rights-control mechanisms under 17 U.S.C. §1201. 3. The repository has substantial non-infringing and general-purpose uses. I am providing this clarification to ensure that the nature and functionality of the repository are accurately represented. If you need any additional information or technical details, I am happy to provide them. Thank you for your time and for reviewing this clarification. Best regards, |
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My general advice for people seeking legal counsel is to find a lawyer who's altruistic enough to work pro bono for initial counsel before taking on a client-advocate relationship, or, failing that, actually pay for a proper job to be done; failing that, say as little as possible when making any official statements. And definitely don't let autocomplete write your emails for you, as that gives any claimants the negligence/incompetence angle. Just a liability in any legal proceedings, let alone in GitHub's case review where they decide whether they want to deal with any claims of negligence or failure to comply with the law on their part by accepting your counter-claim. This all is a paper trail, including this thread, so you already poisoned the well by mentioning AI anyway. It's like telling the teacher you let ChatGPT write your essay: whether the essay is a good read and makes its point well and didn't have that "AI stink" radiating off it somehow is now irrelevant, because you just gave the teacher the go-ahead to fail you for not doing the assignment. I won't belabor the point further. I hope this all turns out all right (and it probably will, since the code is not actually in violation of any laws, and this claim is just a deplatforming attempt to make it slightly harder for people to use websites in a more convenient, less tracker-riddled way.) |
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@roachcord3 This is ridiculously poor advice, any good lawyer would tell you that this is a perfectly appropriate way to come up with a counter notice in a situation like this. There are no realistic situations where sending someone a poorly-written counter-notice would give rise to liability. |
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"Any good lawyer would tell you it's perfectly reasonable to use a LLM as legal counsel" and "nothing you say can or would be used against you in a court" cross the boundary from irresponsible to outright malicious things to claim in a thread where the author of honest software was asking for help protecting himself from so-called "rights holders." Whether you're on some weird agenda or you've just got AI-induced dementia, don't wrap up hard-working, good people in it. Or anyone, really. |
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The idea that you'd need legal councel to respond to a DMCA is as reasonable as the idea that you'd need a lawyer with you when you visit the grocery store, or drive a car. Laws are involved in each situation, and the potential consequences of not having a lawyer with you while driving are far greater than not having a lawyer review a DMCA for you. The whole DMCA process was explicitly designed to work in a way that doesn't require lawyers. |
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But hey, copyright industry shills like @roachcord3 are strongly incentivized to spread disinformation about how scary DMCAs are. |
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I've made a decision. All I want to do is write code and manage this project the same way as all these years before, without having to worry about any external issues like copyright, politics, and so on. The easiest way to achieve this and to just keep doing what I've always done here is to bend the knee and give in, so that's what I'm going to do: rewrite history with Hate me for it or whatever, but that's what is going to happen. I'll remove all files listed in the DMCA Takedown Notice as well as every site that might include Fakku content in the hopes that this is good enough to spare this repo. A (I did write emails to the EFF and GitHub Support, but haven't gotten a reply yet. Jakob took a look at this repo and found that "it has a ton of support for FAKKU pirate websites", pointing to |
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git filter-repo \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/nhentai.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/exhentai.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/hitomi.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/hentaifoundry.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/hentaihand.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/hentainexus.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/koharu.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/hdoujin.py \
--path gallery_dl/extractor/schalenetwork.py \
--path test/results/nhentai.py \
--path test/results/exhentai.py \
--path test/results/hitomi.py \
--path test/results/hentaifoundry.py \
--path test/results/hentaihand.py \
--path test/results/hentainexus.py \
--path test/results/koharu.py \
--path test/results/hdoujin.py \
--path test/results/schalenetwork.py \
--invert-paths |
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thanks for the update and good luck. hopefully they leave you alone after this |
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It is done. I've also sent another email to GitHub Support informing them that all requested files have been removed. Let's hope that this is good enough and this repo will not be taken down or disabled. |
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And do you know that E-Hentai/ExHentai contains zero Fakku content already?
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Sorry to see this. Dealing with a copyright troll is always a difficult decision. Hopefully you'll get clearance to restore these in the future. |
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atm are there any plans of doing hotfixes in case those extractors become broken? even if it's not part of the main repository, or are they functionally deprecated? |
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there are many copies of the removed code on github (in forks and new repos) and on other code hosting sites (e.g. found this one that you can already just load with the -X flag: |
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Thank you for bringing this repo up. Does parsley have an email? I just want to bring his attention to the fact nhentai extractor is broken without creating a codeberg account. i'm getting |
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Someone already has made a pull request. If you are impatient you can just grab the new extractor from there: |
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He is most likely reading here, considering that the nhentai extractor is fixed now. |
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This is bullshit and I am very sorry to see an abusive rightsholder damaging a project like this. |
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If they are so eager to troll people who work hard from their heart, the best thing to do is damage their reputation with the good old word of mouth. After that FAKKU dont deserve any support, they have proven they are the average souless corporate scum. |
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DMCA's should be at github/dmca repo. Can't find it there |
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https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2026/03/2026-03-23-fakku.md |
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God, someone please fill a counternotice and sue them for abuse and perjury, because claiming a tool that allows downloading from a site that "might" have removed anti piracy features is itself a circumvention tool is such mental gymnastics that I can't see even the troll friendliest court siding with them. |
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Jacob just sent me a Discord DM, confirming that gallery-dl is in the clear:
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Since you have a direct line to Jacob, have you tried working out some kind of arrangement with him to allow certain extractors to remain? It seems that he wasn't even aware that this DMCA went out and is open to working with authors of impacted applications. The notice seems overly broad and I can't fathom how a site like Hentai Foundry is infringing, for example. Same for Ex-Hentai, since they have FAKKU content on their do-not-post list and are vigorous about removing them. |
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I did ask him for a specific list of sites. No response. 
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In any case, gallery-dl can use extractors from external modules: |
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Ok got it thanks |
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Maybe there could be an argument that automatically fetches the missing extractors from codeberg so they're usable without having them in the GitHub repo. Just an idea. It doesn't really affect me at all |
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Wtf is that, no way DMCA actually work like this right? |
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I mean the claim itself sounds pure bullshit, regardless of github compliance. |
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Lol even github says it
Not sure what they mean by "other valid copyright claim(s)" though. Not seeing any. |
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This is bull****. Just move the repo to codeberg and stop doing commits here. |
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i agree |
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i pray you have the courage to leave this github repo and start things on codeberg. |
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So much for this: https://github.blog/news-insights/policy-news-and-insights/standing-up-for-developers-youtube-dl-is-back/ Guess you better hope that other people don't follow fakku's example and use abusive dmcas to take down more extractors or this project will slowly die. Unless you set up an easy to use/easy to keep updated way of using extractors maintained somewhere that doesn't allow dmca I guess. |
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it is abusive dmca. i don't want to think that "rEmOVe YoUR mEDiA LLc" is even a real LLC? |
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Fakku making claim to something they don't own to intimidate the person/group into censoring it and then acting like they didn't do it because it was their "agent" who made the claim is something Fakku has been doing since they began working for a porn publisher over a decade ago. Everyone involved at Fakku is unhinged. Consider leaving Github and using an alternative, preferably one that isn't owned by Microsoft or another cancerous corporation. Edit: Forgot to mention that Fakku doxxes people. If they've doxxed you, then there's no point in using an alternative to avoid censorship because they'll go after you IRL. |
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will there be builds for windows that are not stripped down on codeberg and gitlab? |
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With 8137219, binaries from https://github.com/gdl-org/builds/releases are built from a non-stripped source again. |
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We can ask distro, user repository maintainers to pull from codeberg if DMCA'd extractors will continue to be maintained there or at least adjust the packaging to include parsley's repo. |
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OK, so ... based on all the recent comments and feedback in this thread, I've decided on a new course of action:
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Because it's more work on my end. I'd have to apply the same commit on two separate local repositories, which is a lot more error-prone than focusing on a single one. |
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ahh I understand now, this is a really shitty thing and I am so sorry this happened to you, this pure bullshit abuse of DMCA. would we still be able to use the github to create issues regarding gallery-dl or should I sign up for codeberg ? |
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Good choice. Maybe add to the readme that FAKKU's bullying forced you to move elsewhere. Pathetic behaviour for a company to lash out against FOSS projects because of their powerlessness. |
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Props for doing something instead of just letting yourself be bullied by a DMCA troll, but what makes you think Codeberg won't also comply with DMCAs? |
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@bakugo Well, first of all, a difference in jurisdiction. |
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Good to know FAKKU joined the bad guys that bully small, neutral open source projects to feel better about the fact they can't do anything against the perpetrators. Guess I'll be investing some time looking up where to spend less money in the future. |
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never support that is what was a piracy site. huge hypocrite. |
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It's like getting lectured about copyright by Napster :'D |
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Fakku was and will always be made up of villains. The founder, Jacob, created Fakku because he saw Exhentai's growing popularity and profitability. Jacob originally created Fakku as an Exhentai scraper. Before advertisers helped him, he covered the site's bills with student loans. He had a store where he sold items adorned with copyrighted porn that I doubt he had permission for. Fakku tried poaching users from Exhentai by informing Wanimagazine, a Japanese corporation, that Exhentai is sharing paper scans of their magazines. Fakku is so deplorable that people immediately knew the snitch was Fakku, and since Fakku was an Exhentai scraper, Wanimagazine also threatened Fakku to remove the scans, and Fakku spun it into fake evidence that they couldn't have been the snitch because of it. A mod on Exhentai revealed that Wanimagazine gave Exhentai and Fakku the same deal: become their employee and never share unlicensed content. Exhentai declined and Fakku accepted. Fakku continued sharing unlicensed content for about another year while working with Wanimagazine, stopping only after Wanimagazine gave them one more ultimatum. Around this time, Jacob publicly posted his dox of Exhentai's owner for revealing that Fakku wants to secretly censor content. Jacob began trying to assure everyone that he created Fakku as an Exhentai scraper to build enough popularity to convince Wanimagazine to hire him. Oh, I remember asking Jacob if he and his employees are using licensed Adobe products, he refused to answer and he was very annoyed by the question. When Fakku tries to justify their attack on free speech, they'll always try to manipulate you with lies by saying they support free speech, support every artist financially, an unauthorized copy is theft, and copyright claiming or "DMCAing" isn't censorship. When they see their bullshit isn't working on you, they'll admit that they're only trying to oppress you because they "legally" can. Fakku puts content from dead artists behind their paywall. When Fakku made a seven figure profit in a year, they begged people to donate $47k for a licensed translation. If you donated more than $2500, Jacob promised to meet up with you and the artist in Tokyo, but you had to pay for the trip. Given what they wanted to translate, it’s clear they were begging for donations because they didn’t believe it would sell many copies. Fakku sent Google over 45 million copyright removal requests in 11 months in 2021 and he has sent such requests to journalists and news sites to try and censor them for covering his attack on free speech. Fakku only cares about money and lies compulsively, hence why Fakku refuses to take a principled stance. Irodori Comics regurgitates the same anti-sharing lies as Fakku at a much greater frequency. Fakku doesn't let anyone use their store for free and that's why they refused to ban Irodori Comics when people learned Irodori Comics get paid to translate popular works without the owners' permission, post Nhentai URLs in large gatherings, and help solicit donations for more unlicensed translations. Neither Fakku nor Irodori Comics sell translations of most of the works they’ve censored. This is because, besides enjoying censoring content, they get paid by the artist to send a copyright removal request on the artist's behalf. Irodori Comics might actually be a proxy of Fakku. Fakku hates being associated with low quality translating, typesetting and lettering. One person offered a temporary job and a former employee both said Irodori Comics pay far below minimum wage, which explains why when they release a licensed translation, it contains so many errors. Irodori Comics has censored possibly up to 100000 galleries on Exhentai. The first artists who allowed their self-published works to be translated by Irodori Comics were employed or previously employed by Wanimagazine. Years before Edsel Ayes aka EdMX "co-founded" Irodori Comics, Jacob set up a blog on Fakku for him. I haven't been able to verify this rumor but it sounds typical of Fakku and Irodori Comics. They won't translate or sell an artist's work for free and they don't share some of the profit with the artist until they've sold enough copies. They apparently make exceptions for really popular artists. |
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This is literally ALL fake news. I've seen you make variations of this post for years now, come on! It's so dishonest! Like this is how you describe a successful KICKSTARTER!?
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@a84r7a3rga76fg thank you for all the FACTS. dishonest fake news your ass. |
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Why move from one centralised platform to another and not think about using something better like https://radicle.xyz/ for example? |
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why move to a centralized platform, when you can move to a decentralized one (specifically tangled.org) |
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i rather donate to mikf for self hosting git server |
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I wonder what is the state of the snap distribution at the moment? |
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There is a subreddit created by a real lawyer specifically for attacks on open source projects: https://www.reddit.com/r/Opensource_legalAid The lawyer already successfully helped to close at least this one case: https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/s/K89GaGjEev The help is for free, as far as I understand. |
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I'm Jacob, the CEO of FAKKU. The notice being discussed was sent by a 3rd party DMCA agent without our approval or permission. It seems they are using AI to find repositories related to legitimate issues and projects like this one got caught up in it. I've informed them NOT to continue doing this and to immediately cease. The underlying issue is similar to if there was a website that illegally hosted Netflix content it had downloaded from torrents. Then that illegal website put up advertisements next to the content, or even a paywall cheaper than Netflix to make money. Obviously, that's against the law and Netflix would do something about it. That's generally what we are having to fight against. Ironically projects like this actually hurt that illegal website, by circumventing THEIR paywall or advertisements, and serving the content inside an app for free (which was originally paid content). It's a complicated issue, but going after projects like this doesn't solve the root problem. |
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But I assume you have no problem with nhentai, e-hentai and rule34 doing the same without paying the artist a dime? Who's "hard work" are we actually talking about here? |
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@VicesOfTheMind Jacob you're logged into your alt |
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Hi Jacob. Could you please look into clearing the "hentai-foundry" extractor? Your AI-using DMCA agent apparently flagged this site as infringing copyright and thus caused the removal of support for this website from gallery-dl. However, hentai-foundry is unrelated to anything related to the works posted on your website, FAKKU. |
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@roachcord3 I have no love for the DMCA approach, since FAKKU should simply offer a better service. But the fact that hentai artists are getting royally screwed out of receiving any overseas earnings despite their popularity is a problem and the "all hentai should be free and anyone saying otherwise is |
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@VicesOfTheMind Jacob, don't talk to me on your alt account. |
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Typical JG. Quite ironic as a former massive content pirate trying to masquerade as an intellectual property crusader after all those years of coexisting with a certain website but give it enough time - karma always strikes back. The Remove Your Media, LLC bot agents are not to be taken seriously, which is why no one obeys those takedowns per se and instead keeps the 'infringing' content just within legal reach so they can't do anything about it. While the bot itself is a troll, the companies using it force hands via fearmongering (ever seen the F! meme? Yeah, that's the one). Thanks for standing strong and moving to CB, Mike. Do not negotiate with terrorists. Ever. Almost universal state policy for a reason. |
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That Takahashi Irodori Comics guy is the same breed too |
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and others
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I've received an email regarding a Fakku ™️ DMCA involving gallery-dl as well as 28 other repositories:
They expect me to remove these "offending" files by rewriting the entire repo history using
git-filter-repowithin 1 week: https://docs.github.com/articles/remove-sensitive-dataI'm very hesitant to this idea and would honestly rather switch to a different platform than making any major changes.
If anyone knows how to deal with such GitHub DMCA takedown requests and/or could offer any legal advice, I'd be much obliged.
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