But to me as a long time Gitlab fan this shows the power of using Gitlab. Because if they were using Gitlab when the DMCA hits they could have easily migrated to their own Gitlab instance.
While Github would have to export things into another format. I'm sure people have worked on exporting data from Github to Gitlab but it seems much easier to just use Gitlab.
Edit: And of course besides data, you can't migrate contributors as easy. Which is also where Gitlab is powerful because it's open source and people are actually discussing federation in it. I doubt Github will ever get any kind of federation outside of microsoft services.
Not sure if I would do that. Wouldn't that make me directly a target for the companies issuing the DMCA?
Yes, if you host this anywhere without safe harbour protection you're going to get the DMCA takedown directly
Worse, these companies are often backed/protected by powerful figures (often under the umbrella of some influential state members) and under such power, these kind of "threats" will be eradicated very efficiently, especially with Bilibili which is partially "state-monitored" (not sure if sponsored) due to the presence of the channel of the official youth branch of CCP is opened there [1].
Thus, relocating your repository to gangs aren't safe at all.
A rule of thumb: The prerequisite for your business to survive in China is that you need to have powerful affiliates, and make sure you do not piss off that powerful guy.
[1]: https://space.bilibili.com/20165629?from=search&seid=1277417...
Gitee has hosted a youtube-dl mirror for years.
It seems to be an old (last updated 2 yrs ago) project providing some kind of gui for youtube-dl.
Then people straight out attacking me thinking I'm attacking China...
[1] a collection of cases: https://github.com/HiddenStrawberry/Crawler_Illegal_Cases_In...
It might be the case, but the repo you linked doesn't support that claim very well, and the cases cited are largely irrelevant to the case at hand.
"Forbidden area #1: providing scraping-related services to criminal organizations". Three cases listed. The first is one programmer's personal account of being arrested, which is very scant on why; the only info I can glean: "I developed some sort of ML API which is then used by a criminal enterprise against some influential company for god knows what purpose". Hard to draw any conclusion from that. The second case is ML-based CAPTCHA bypass for credential stuffing against Tencent QQ, emphasis on credential stuffing. The third case is some sort of black hat SEO campaign against Baidu, the scraping part (if any?) doesn't seem central to the conviction.
"Forbidden area #2: scraping and sale of personal info". Common sense, irrelevant.
"Forbidden area #3: commercial use of unlicensed business data" and the following untitled category list three cases, all of which are mass scraping operations either from a business competitor or that seriously affects site operations (through aggressive scraping).
AFAIK there are a lot of low hanging fruits in the Chinese piracy scene not yet targeted, and there are enough small-time commercial operations involving copyrighted media products begging to be taken down, it's highly unlikely anyone will bother to target some high-barrier-of-entry tool mostly facilitating the download of otherwise public videos.
> it's highly unlikely anyone will bother to target some high-barrier-of-entry tool mostly facilitating the download of otherwise public videos
It's true that any particular violation is unlikely to be prosecuted because there are so many, but youtube-dl is already being targeted, so if it stays up on Gitee (or Gitlab, for that matter), then only because RIAA doesn't file a complaint.
> only because RIAA doesn't file a complaint
Pretty sure RIAA/MPAA aren’t targeting China (yet), it’s still a bittorrenting Wild West according to my Chinese sources. They’ll need lawyers specialized in Chinese law and be prepared to navigate a foreign legal system if they want to look that way, frivolous DMCA takedowns that they file hundreds a day won’t do.
The power of a legal threat lies in the fact that there could be follow-up legal action; it’s toothless if no legal action could follow.
Pretty sure they already have Chinese lawyers. While suing every single BitTorrent user would be an exercise in futility, the effort is much more justified when limited to the handful of big video platforms, where the licensing fees are enough to offset the legal costs of enforcing compliance. Those platforms are using their licensed content to convert free users into paid (e.g. first few episodes are free to get you hooked, the rest requires a VIP account), so they also have an incentive to prevent pirates from undercutting them with a free copy on their own platform.
I think torrents will get less and less popular in China due to an increasingly mobile-first user base and rising incomes making paid content more convenient that piracy. I know someone active in the subbing scene, and they recently had to handle an entire subtitling project on their own because the other members quit the group. (I don't know why they quit, though. Maybe they just grew out of the hobby.)