Said company is literally in court against said government at the moment, after said government attempted to designate it too dangerous to do business with.
There are currently over 1,000 companies involved in lawsuits against the US government right now even if we restrict ourselves to just tariff lawsuits.
Generally you have to plan and design the codec first, then ask for a reference implementation in Python or another easy language for refining, and then finally translate it to a lower-level language like C.
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.
In general no! The EFF is not interested in litigating laws that are firmly established! They spend their resources on cases that can set legal precedent.
When you call about something like this, they’ll try to give you some general advice and refer you to a law firm.
Sadly, you're mostly right and the comments section saying to find a pro-bono lawyer is laughable. I think anyone who believes that exists should actually reach out to a real lawyer and see how that conversation goes. I've had those conversations.
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.
Both should be done. Often the actual illegally hosted materials are on servers not friendly with takedown requests or will get immediately reloaded by the pirates. By going after the links it can cut off the ability for people to find the illegally hosted materials.
Is this like how in France, DNS resolvers are legally required to block certain websites? That's right, if you run "unbound" with default options in France you're a felon.
Seems like a strange way to attempt to police the internet by proxy. The Internet should ignore or route around people attempting to police how nodes connect to each other.
I agree that the larger Internet should be capable of routing lawful traffic through jurisdictions where such traffic is lawful to another jurisdiction where the traffic is lawful. But within a country for example local laws should be applied to the traffic.
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.
I am fine with encryption, but there should be a legal process that can stop the violation of laws such as by disconnecting nodes that violate laws or preventing linking to nodes that violate laws.
I think you're missing the concept here that laws change as a packet travels from one switch to another, not to mention what happens after they go under the ocean.
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.
Suppose there is a shared server outside your jurisdiction which is hosting a wide variety of content none of which is a violation of the law in their jurisdiction, but 2% of the content is a violation of the law in your jurisdiction. Or isn't hosting any content at all but also isn't a jurisdiction that does the same censorship as yours and then people can use the connection as a VPN.
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.
Which is heartbreaking (and I'd argue misleading too), but not the whole story.
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.
Wait a second... By the view you're espousing right now, doesn't that make this conversation "illegal"? Why aren't we filing DMCA takedowns to HN because the list of the naughty sites is at the top of the page for this very thread?
In this case the files you could view on github literally had links directly to copyrighted works. It was not just that it was compatible with pirate sites.
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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?
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.
Ain't that the truth. My older desktop's DHCP and WLAN services no longer work. So either I reinstall Windows 10 or see if I can get what I need it to do on Windows
This is not a surprise or a gotcha.
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