Over 900 Rarbg Magnet Link Repos Anonymously Nuked from GitHub | Hacker News Reader

Over 900 Rarbg Magnet Link Repos Anonymously Nuked from GitHub

torrentfreak.com

146 pointsKomoD61 comments

I can't understand why anyone would use GitHub for anything DMCA-able when there's archive.org, mega, ipfs, i2p, and the new z-lib home. Perhaps some people believe it's equivalent to Gitee when it's not or are too lazy to put it somewhere that won't immediately dmcarot or linkrot.

It’s because of this:

> One early upload of more than 270,000 links appeared on GitHub and then took on a life of its own as contributors added to the database and created their own forks.

> A subsequent readme file suggests that the archive later contained over six million magnet links, possibly one of the largest collections ever seen.

Github has users and it’s trivial to contribute.

I don’t see why you wouldn’t host/mirror on GitHub even in light of this event since you can mine free contributions no matter where else you host it.

Could a hybrid approach work? [1] Add a "Login with Github" button on a forum or some other file sharing thing or some other self hosted repo platform.

[1] - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/71741596/how-do-i-implem...

SQLite database replicated in some fashion?

Rarbg was on ipfs but it is now gone again, not sure if it's up somewhere else. This was the link that was posted to HN a while ago:

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbpRxBZ5HDZDVRoeAU8xFYnoP4r5eGCxdkmfFW...

It’s gone from the ipfs.io gateway but the CID is still available in the network. Take your own IPFS node (e.g. companion or Brave’s built-in) and you should be able to resolve it

Archive.org is DMCA-able. I know, I just lost a very comfy Sailor Moon VHS archive because of it.

Mega is too, as to be expected. That’s the whole reason Kim Dotcom is in so much hot water.

>Sailor Moon VHS archive

Why would you watch a VHS rip over a higher quality encode of the series? Was the VHS a fansub or something? What is the benefit of all those VHS glitches and muddy muted colors and that blur on the bottom of the edges?

Nostalgia?

Doesn't Gitee require manual review of all repos now?

Do we just have to read their mind? It's not DMCAable in the first place, this is yet another bogus DMCA request.

I've used gitee for OSS before, but never knew they could be used for DMCA-able content.

> Gitee was chosen by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology of the Chinese government to make an "independent, open-source code hosting platform for China." [0]

erm, sounds like that would just swap one government's ideology of unsharable information with another government's. It's just not called DMCA. Those two do overlap, even in the most popular of cases like US movies, but for different reasons.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gitee

How can I best contact archive.org? Will definitely be following up with them to see if they can host these git repos.

They already host a ton of torrent DB archives.

Because people already have github accounts. This makes the friction to contributors less than with other sites. I would still keep a mirror in another site.

Plus it's owned by Microsoft, of course they aren't going to host that and the first complaint, down it goes.

What’s the new z-lib home?

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34776188

And https://inkstickmedia.com/z-librarys-closure-raises-tough-qu...

And their single login domain got seized. Oh boy.

I used Bing and the first link it gave was to a working site.

I agree, this looks like a misuse of Github unless these magnet link archives were part of a software project. I'm fed up with people abusing this service for this stuff. Support piracy somewhere else.

Why is this legally allowed? Do they not have to prove that a hash belongs to copyrighted material? Also how is a hash of something equal to being the thing? Do copyrighted laws have specific sub-laws when it comes to digital media?

DMCA take down notices can be abused and there is no upshot for github to fight this in court, especially if the material are torrent links not any kind of software project

Github has no reason to keep hosting the repos. It's obvious that their only purpose is to facilitate piracy.

Github is in the code hosting business, not the movie pirating business.

What’s stopping me from doing the same but rot13’ing the magnet link?

Probably a combination of motive and ability.

Most of this is irrelevant. The process is (more or less, read up on DMCA for details): someone sends notice, GH as a provider takes down content until counterclaim from the repo owner, then the 2 parties can battle it in court.

I doubt any repo owner will want to challenge anything here. Unless they have EFF behind them trying to prove a point or something like that.

So basically, guilty until proven innocent.

Not complying with DMCA doesn’t directly get into legal trouble. It’s not a crime and doesn’t create (itself) any civil liability.

What it does do is forfeit a safe harbor defense against copyright infringement liability. Basically, as long as you comply with take down requests, you can’t be sued for copyright infringement unless you knew about it.

It’s part of a quid pro quo with online services that publish user content.

Other publishers are liable for what they publish even if they didn’t know about it.

Without the DMCA, Google would be liable for all the piracy that happens on the site.

This isn’t a criminal case so the process doesn’t involve guilt. It actually allows everyone to stay out of court. Unless the copyright holder then sues the uploader.

But how can the repo owner do that if the complainant is anonymous?

The counterclaim is sent to the provider, so in this case GitHub.

Also the original claim was not anonymous. The source just wasn't made public. See https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/06/2023-06-2...

The files in the repo are a list of magnet URIs which contain in this case the hash plus the title of the content.

Something like this :

    magnet:?xt=urn:btih:BSXYFTH5VCJLB32DYS2FPTJUB2IVNKUS&dn=Fedora-Astronomy_KDE-Live-x86_64-37

Github is likely to be actively cooperating. They normally seek to remove such content; it's against the terms of service.

Has there been a clear decision whether links are covered by the DMCA/copyright law or not? If there has been a clear decision that they're not, counter-notifications could be effective.

Generally they take it down and -you- have to prove it's not protected under DMCA rules. They settle on the side that means they are least likely to be sued.

If the hash in practice gives users the ability to download the content, yes.

Could be found here https://github.com/TrueAnon99/RARBG

    ,__'.
    |___|

Come And Take It

Another copy to clone locally. Thanks. I've got a few other repos, some with tools to sort through the data.

Streisand effect in action! I never would have cloned this, otherwise.

Heil Hydra.

The headline is misleading: it's 900 forks of the same GitHub repository and AFAICS a DMCA of one repository also takes down its forks.

To make it more difficult to take down, they could clone and push a new repository back to GitHub without the fork relationship.

> AFAICS a DMCA of one repository also takes down its forks

Only if specified, and no, it's not misleading, they are still individual repositories.

Also available at https://rarxd.lol (no new links added yet, just around 2.5 million links from the previous dumps). Looking into checking the health of each and every link.

Anybody got any tips?

note that GitHub also instantly suspends accounts based on file content:

https://github.com/4cq2/blog/tree/main/2023-03/github-suspen...

Are you surprised that they've deployed countermeasures against patterns of abuse?

how is an HLS playlist abuse?

It's abuse when it's being used to coordinate pirate video streams -- which, when a new user creates a HLS playlist as their very first action, is the most likely possibility.

I agree, their actions are totally justified. lets just instantly ban these accounts without even a warning email. great idea.

The post is puzzled and thinks there’s a great mystery about what the infringed content was, but the DMCA Notice is crystal clear:

> The original copyrighted content is/was posted online at: [private] [private] (*) There are various 18+ porn videos from these or other sites that I own that are directly linked in these files. These files are behind a paid membership area, so aren't fully available publicly.

So, what’s the puzzlement? That they redacted the actual titles?

The interesting part is the focus on the finger pointing at the magnet (which points at the torrent) Basically, citizens are not allowed to point at things.

The web is full of "$name (1970)" and there are also lots of torrents with those keywords. some will have "1080p" some "BluRay" some "X264" etc etc

In stead of sharing the magnet you can share "$name.1970.1080p.x264" and the recipient can pretty much find what you are talking about like "Steal This Film II.720p.mov"

Wait a bit for persecution to "mature" then evolve the format to use keywords like "wonderful","amazing","great","funny","western","horror",etc possibly in specific order to save ink while ignoring "it's","and","thats",etc

The adventure is more interesting than the recordings.

Always remember to s/GitHub/Microsoft/

Self hosted alternatives:

Gogs Gitea GitBucket Sourcehut

In fact, just google it. Torrents-csv uses gitea: https://git.torrents-csv.ml/heretic/torrents-csv-server

I love how they built a whole project around sharing a single csv file. It's got a docker compose setup.

torrents-csv does not have rarbg database. https://git.torrents-csv.ml/heretic/torrents-csv-data/issues...

Seems eminently doable though. I for one look forward to seeing it loaded in!

FYI, https://rarbg.best/ has the full rarbg database (up until May 31)

So why is this better than a torrent site that shows what's actually being seeded or not? I have a feeling 99% of these would be dead.

So metadata such as magnet links are considered contributory infringement? I wonder how that was established.

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