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.
When you call about something like this, they’ll try to give you some general advice and refer you to a law firm.
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.
1) You can have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, but then anyone can route around censorship because you don't know if they're discussing geopolitics or distributing DeCSS.
2) You can't have an encrypted connection between two jurisdictions that have different laws, which is >99% of all connections because even different cities have different laws, which is an Orwellian panopticon and the destruction of all privacy.
I'm going to have to insist we stick with the first one.
Are you prepared to be held accountable for breaking the laws of repressed countries that sentence people to death for leaving a religion or insulting authority?
I assume not, but then it's an arbitrary game of whos laws and when. The only logical continuation would be if we had a standard of law worldwide, but that's a separate problem in itself and not anywhere near reality today.
If people in your jurisdiction can make a secure connection to it, e.g. to get the 98% of the content they have which is lawful in your jurisdiction, then they can also get the content you were trying to ban because you can't tell which one they're doing. Preventing this is all or nothing: Either they can connect to the server that isn't subject to your laws, or they can't. And the latter is heinous and tyrannical.
You can only issue takedowns in relation with material that you have copyright over. At least one of these sites I know for a fact routinely scrubs FAKKU licensed content, and abides by takedown requests.
It might even be true. Not having a download button is a copy protection measure as defined in the DMCA. If this project bypasses not having a download button, it's an illegal circumvention measure under DMCA.
https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/discussions/9304#discussioncomment-16279674
https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/discussions/9304#discussioncomment-16280050
That's absurd. Not having something is different from actively implementing measures to prevent something. I could similarly make the argument that any content that I can watch on my device doesn't really have copy protection measures because those bytes were purposefully copied into my display buffer.
Anti-circumvention provisions are a cancer that needs to die. They can be used to criminalize just about anything.
Is it? Isn't Section 512 the takedown section that applies to infringing works (e.g. notices require "Identification of the copyrighted work claimed to have been infringed", 512(c)(3)(A)(ii)) and Section 1201 the separate anti-circumvention section which has government-imposed criminal penalties but no private takedown provision?