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Comment by cantbecool | Hacker News Reader

Is it against GitHub's TOS? I have a web app, http://www.moviemagnet.net, that's a movie torrent aggregator that I was going to throw up on GitHub after I wrote some integration tests. It would be shocking to me that they would remove the repo since they weren't technically serving torrents.

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The TOS don't make any promises:

GitHub does not pre-screen Content, but GitHub and its designee have the right (but not the obligation) in their sole discretion to refuse or remove any Content that is available via the Service.

and

We may, but have no obligation to, remove Content and Accounts containing Content that we determine in our sole discretion are unlawful, offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable or violates any party's intellectual property or these Terms of Service.

That would explain it. It's remarkable how ambiguous TOSs in general are. I can see from a business perspective how Github was probably pressured from outside source, MPAA, to remove the application that could be used as a conduit to illegally download magnet links. This is such a slippery slope though...

I would say the terms are one sided (at least on this issue). I don't think they are ambiguous.

I don't think it is really a slippery slope either, there would be a bunch of new law needed to make it so that offering a platform for publication carried the obligation to publish things (a lot of it focused on protecting the service provider from liability).

This particular TOS part is not ambiguous. It means "we can delete anything".

> "...and its designee..."

Can someone explain to me whom this portion of the clause refers to?

Anyone who Github has said it does ("designated").

IANAL, but I would guess this is effectively to allow non-employees like contractors to do the removal legally.

Anything can be considered offensive, threatening, libelous, defamatory, pornographic, obscene or otherwise objectionable by some people how do you define such subjective views.

There Terms of service are very vague.

Of course.

You cannot anticipate all future issues but need to be prepared to have the means to act if it creates liability/risk for you (as a company).

TOS in general are vague but encompassing. I guess that's the point though

>> "It would be shocking to me that they would remove the repo since they weren't technically serving torrents."

I don't think it matters if they're serving torrents or not. The movie industry will likely sue them anyway and GitHub probably doesn't want to be involved in any way.

If they removed the tracker file then nothing can be wrong. It's not illegal to stream torrents. Just to stream copyrighted torrents.

I will move away from github if this is true! First the sexism and now this!

The point was that the MPAA can make life very expensive for GitHub if even if they don't have legal footing.

Seems super similar (not to say a clone) to movies.io

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