Hacker News Reader

Comment by direwolf20 | Hacker News Reader

It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.

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.

View on HN

> Not having a download button is a copy protection measure.

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.

You will own nothing and you will be happy. Or else.

The problem here is that the complaint seems to be filed by the copyright owner (or licensee) but the code is accessing piracy sites. There could be a circumvention case if the piracy site is the one filing the copyright complaint, but they have not.

    https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/discussions/9304#discussioncomment-16279674

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.

    https://github.com/mikf/gallery-dl/discussions/9304#discussioncomment-16280050

they also list hentaifoundry which afaik is a site for users to post their own art and is certainly not a piracy site

> It's lawful if you have a good faith belief that it's a circumvention tool.

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?

Is that the benchmark? A website that disables the right click to prevent visitors from saving the content can still be saved by the browser. That’s an active measure to disable downloads being circumvented by the browser. So is Chrome going down?

Can you cite the relevant passages from the DMCA that support this argument? I have trouble bringing the two together.

But that's a different process, not the usual notice-and-takedown notice procedure. If it's consider a circumvention device, there is no way to file a counterclaim, among other things.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com