DMCA Takedown of iptv-org/iptv on GitHub
github.comNote to article submitters: The HN audience aren't mind readers. Posting a link like this, which simply shows the GitHub repo being taken down with a terms of service violation, with no further information, isn't helpful. There is no info:
1. on what iptv-org/iptv actually is/was.
2. that corroborates that this was actually a DMCA takedown request
3. that actually provides any additional context at all about when/why this happened
I'm guessing maybe there are some articles/forums/etc. that have some more context. If so, you should submit links to those instead. If not, and you just want to bring attention to this, submit a text submission to explain more details around what's going on.
Only 1) would be really valuable here. Expecting a legitimate 2) explanation from a DMCA request is idealistic/naive.
Otherwise HN comments usually provide the rest. News/blog posts with loaded headlines can often derail conversations as much as provide context. Which is why I'm hesitant to expect HN's frontpage to be an editorialized newspaper or heavily moderated forum that better serves the low engagement crowd.
If you have an actual better source then by all means, share it. I'm sure dang will consider swapping it.
No, GitHub posts their received DMCA notices publicly and links to them from the takedown page. So 2) is a reasonable expectation and it isn't present here, suggesting the post title is pure speculation.
> explanation from a DMCA request is idealistic/naive.
There is not even proof/details it was a DMCA takedown request. Given the subject matter, of course wouldn't be surprised, but all you are going to get in the comments is pure speculation/blathering because there is simply no information about what's going on.
https://news.ycombinator.com/from?site=github.com/iptv-org right there next to the title.
https://archive.org/details/github.com-iptv-org-iptv_-_2022-...
https://old.reddit.com/r/IPTV/comments/j1l8ps/iptvorg_hit_wi...
https://web.archive.org/web/20201117192948if_/https://codelo...
https://web.archive.org/web/20220925054954if_/https://iptv-o...
The parent honestly believes that this takedown is not copyright-related. Thought experiment: What are the other ways a repository containing only URLs could violate Github ToS.
> The parent honestly believes that this takedown is not copyright-related.
Doesn't sound like it.
When I clicked on the link and saw the placeholder page, I was wondering "wtf did anyone bother submitting this useless link?". My expectation was the link would have been to the DMCA notice sent to GitHub, which would have been more useful.
Next step was to look for further info in the HN thread instead.
Anyway, while your post has some useful links, the parent's post is also correct and it's a bit crappy to claim things about it which aren't actually in it.
Still thinking mind reading is a better option considering your #3 link to reddit is from 2 years ago.
From a mirrored/archived version of the README:
>Collection of publicly available IPTV (Internet Protocol television) channels from all over the world.
Asking submitters to do that is a little rude given that moderators are in the habit of editing out added details and redirecting to original sources. Crafting a good submission is not generally appreciated.
That's not really accurate.
I'm not asking the submitter to editorialize the headline, which is what is frowned upon. In fact, the headline already is editorialized, because it says this was a DMCA takedown, but there is no evidence to support that. I'm asking to either:
1. Submit to an article source that actually has more information.
2. Submit a text submission, where it's fine to add details of what's going on, or even to ask for more information. E.g. this happens all the time for users who were cut off from some service, then they explain the situation and ask for assistance.
Claiming conspiracy is no excuse not to write the “here’s why I posted this” paragraph recommended by the guidelines, mods, and other readers.
Github posts their DMCA claims, and I'm not seeing one for iptv https://github.com/github/dmca/search?q=iptv&type=
Checking the most likely spot in that repo (eg without using the search feature), doesn't show any likely looking candidates either:
https://github.com/github/dmca/tree/master/2023/02
That being said, the most recent dated one was 23rd Feb (last Thursday), so it does seem possible there might be a lag of a few days for stuff to show up. Not real sure though.
The DMCA repository was last updated 2 days ago, and this link likely appeared on HackerNews only a few hours after the IPTV repository was unpublished. Therefore, it appears that they simply have not yet published the DMCA notice.
No, you get a different message for that.
For example: https://github.com/dts50/dts50.github.io
It seems like they don't publish updates on weekends or US holidays. So if it is a dmca, we're likely to see it published in that repo tomorrow.
From other posts, the repository has been down for at least some of the past week. Long enough you'd expect any notice to be posted.
Well, its tough to say what the situation actually is.
9 days with no response, is a surefire way to force any professional group off your host, and embroil yourself in bad press, and potential litigation. That said the group may not be that professional but they deserve a timely response.
Can't say for sure but this sure looks and sounds more like potential antitrust violations/issues on the MS/Github side, than DMCA stuff.
I mean the silence speaks absolute volumes, and companies that do this to free customers will do this to paying customers. There is no financial benefit to doing this and keeping quiet, only damage.
Everyone in business knows the classic age-old wisdom, what you do in small things that don't matter, dictates how you handle big things when real risks are on the line.
They haven't clarified or communicated with the maintainers aside from vague boilerplate which doesn't say or point to any reasonable knowledge of what their (customers) did wrong.
So, just what everyone has been saying for years as opinion (but confirmed now). You can't use Github for anything where you need a professional response.
Sorry, I don't understand your post. Could you share where you are getting this information (e.g. you say "9 days with no response", where is that coming from?)
All I can see from the link is that the repo was taken down due to a terms of service violation. If there is more info/details/etc. about why this repo was taken down, would be nice if there were some links to that instead. Get's kinda frustrated that article submitters think we're somehow privy to the same "inside baseball" as they are, without providing any more information.
Discussion link was posted below as one of the first links, https://github.com/orgs/iptv-org/discussions/12.
Maintainers had commented, said they had an open ticket but no response, and didn't know what was going on, and the ticket was 9 days old. That's where it came from.
the law says that GitHub (in this case) must take down the repo if a DMCA claim is made. the reason doesn't matter, the identity of the claimant doesn't matter, and the repo in question doesn't matter.
the owner of the repo that has been taken down can file a counterclaim (that may not be the word, I am not a lawyer) which the original DMCA-thrower must respond to within 10 days. if they do not respond in 10 days, or the response is insufficient in some way, the repo goes back up.
this whole time there is nothing GitHub can say to anyone that changes anything, and they would be foolish to comment on ongoing legal disputes, anyway.
most repos come back up after 10 days, I imagine, especially the ones taken down by unjust claims.
so, just because it's been 9 days with no communication means exactly nothing.
the law mandates this process, and GitHub must follow it.
So if I sent a DMCA notice against every one of Microsoft's Repos on Github, they would go down for ten days if I ignored the counter-claim? Because if not, why not?
You should give it a go - in reality these rules are for people hosting other people’s content (as in GitHub hosting your project), and filing against MS repos probably falls in a grey area, or an area where MS is more likely to say F you.
The problem is that the DMCA is designed to explicitly allow and encourage weaponisation of fraudulent take down claims. Specifically in GH doesn’t obey the DMCA and pull the repo the DMCA makes them legally liable for the alleged infringement. Why would they take on that risk for any random organization/project that likely can’t afford the legal costs?
Github is allowed to ignore dmca requests which are blatently not valid. (As an example, wikimedia ignores about 95% of dmca requests it gets https://wikimediafoundation.org/about/transparency/2022-1/dm... )
Not a lot of incentives to do so though because if they are incorrect about it they just took on a lot of liability.
Because that'd be perjury, which is a federal crime.
https://docs.github.com/en/site-policy/content-removal-polic...
I'm just gonna quote GitHub "The DMCA requires that you swear to the facts in your copyright complaint under penalty of perjury. It is a federal crime to intentionally lie in a sworn declaration. (See U.S. Code, Title 18, Section 1621.) Submitting false information could also result in civil liability — that is, you could get sued for money damages. The DMCA itself provides for damages against any person who knowingly materially misrepresents that material or activity is infringing. "
Seems like no one has ever been prosecuted for perjury on a DMCA take down notice. This feels like more of an empty threat by Github to prevent false DMCA complaints, but of course submitting claims on their repos would be one heck of a way to test that.
https://law.stackexchange.com/questions/51541/has-anyone-bee...
a lot of the "infrastructure" within the legal community, including laws themselves, assume that the attorneys practicing the law are operating in good faith and with ethics in mind. It's clear these days that there are quite a few attorneys who are simply not operating in good faith.
The law also recognizes that attorneys work for their clients and with in many ways are obligated to do what the client wishes. that includes "fucking around" with the law, it seems. Legal ethics rules are supposed to prevent the worst of it, but because it happened so rarely prior to the current day, the legal system has developed no "antibodies" against this kind of behavior.
it is also becoming clear to attorneys that there is little or no punishment for malevolent behavior except in extremely egregious situations, so expect this trend to continue for a while until some remedy is developed.
I dont know how it all ended up, but there was this whole thing https://torrentfreak.com/digital-trails-how-bungie-identifie... [not for purjury though]
Wouldn't there effectively be no penalty if it were submitted by a user in another country? Also good luck proving that anyone "knowingly materially misrepresents" anything.
Do yout get reimbursed for 10 days of lost traffic/productivity then? There should be a safeguard, that the maker of the claim would cover damages caused by the invalid claim...
Lying in legal documents is already illegal. DMCA takedown done in bad faith can in theory be prosecuted or brought to trial but in practice nobody cares enough to spend time and effort on getting false claiments in front of a judge.
My understanding is no.
Would it be different if one is paying GitHub? It should be (I hope so). And same should be true at GitLab? Anyone tested it? Or am I paying for "nothing"?
It is doubtful, its age old wisdom for a reason.
Most cases these days, you pay for the value add features (differentiation strategy) but the base ... (free) is in most cases monetized through alternate strategies. It is how they can cover costs to provide free to anyone that wants to sign up.
Unless you have a written SLA that makes guarantees, with firm timetables, you most likely aren't getting what you think you bought.
the DMCA does not care if you pay or not. the 10-day counterclaim response window is required by law.
but those notices are posted in a conspicuous place, and there is no notice posted for those repos, at least according to others that have had the time to look.
What makes you think this is DMCA when no notice is posted, and the posts on the discussion forum from the maintainers show it was for breach of TOS which hasn't been elaborated on by GitHub staff 9 days later...
> the 10-day counterclaim response window is required by law.
Punitive towards individuals and small businesses.
From what I can see, it seems to be a curated list of IPTV sources [1]
Which puts it in search engine activity territory.
I'm reminded that Github stood up to the UK's City of London Police who issued a DMCA for the PirateBay Proxy on GitHub. [2]
However Law can be used to resource burn entities where no compensation for failed legal attempts exist as the City of London Police demonstrated with their actions.
[1] https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:0Ku53I... [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34659768
> Punitive towards individuals and small businesses.
take it up with Congress via your local representatives. I didn't write the law.
The DMCA makes almost no requirement that the claim be valid. It is only obviously invalid claims which are allowed to be ignored by the hosting provider receiving the DMCA claim. All other DMCA claims must result in the takedown of the cited content, and it doesn't matter if the claim is valid or not, it doesn't matter if there is precedent regarding other content; the only thing that matters when a claim is received is that it not be an obviously false claim.
There is no due process between the time a claim is received and the time of the takedown of the content cited in the claim. It is an assumption of infringement, with the 10-day thing I previously described being the only way out unless the victim chooses to sue.
I'm a bit annoyed that people (who were apparently educated on the DMCA by Slashdot comment sections alone) seem to have a lot of detailed knowledge about the DMCA but not about the portion of the DMCA which describes the 10-day counterclaim response window.
Any plausible (and not expensive) recourse in such situations?
I've had a game server emulator project DMCA-ed previously, and my team's casual research couldn't come up with any solutions. Despite the takedown's text being factually incorrect (it was all rewritten code, not proprietary), there seemed to be no one to appeal to. Instead, we just moved it off GitHub with no further negative consequences. This resulted in some lost visibility and broken links though.
Not really. I don't think Github has any continuing service obligation to you, especially as a non-paying user. Taking Github to court to find out for sure is probably expensive.
In theory, you could provide a counter notice, and Github says they will reenable repos after two weeks of a counter notice unless the claimed owner provides Github with notice of a lawsuit. But you may want to get legal advice before you do this.
Also in theory, the DMCA provides for damages for improper notices, but collecting on that would require a most likely expensive to start court case.
> Also in theory, the DMCA provides for damages for improper notices, but collecting on that would require a most likely expensive to start court case.
Is there some "small claims" type of court where that would do that with minimal cost for the damaged person? I know way too many people who posted stuff on youtube that was either clear fair use or clearly not the copyrighted content, but youtubes automatic ID of music muted or removed their videos... If each of those could start a process for eg. $100, and got their $100 back + all the lost monetization (not a lot, but doesn't matter), companies would quickly change the way they operate.
Proving fair use is legally complex, and to be blunt it is very possible you are incorrect - in any case, it is unlikely a lower court would judge on it at all given the complexity rather than referring it to a higher court (note this is a generalisation as parent doesn't identify the territory they are in, but it's a reasonable one).
Also note that YouTube's ContentID process is not a DMCA process. It is a privately negotiated system that YouTube have come to a commercial arrangement with various rightsowners in order to minimise their legal liability. You have no come back against this, because they are not DMCA notices at the first stage to be improper.
If you want a video hosting service that is going to have your back on this then you are probably going to need to use one that is more expensive than free, and quite possibly demonstrate that you have indemnity insurance.
It might be expensive but the false claimant would end up paying the legal bills
Did you submit a counterclaim?
Where did you move to?
Self-hosted GitLab with a <project-name>.com domain.
Poor maintainers also added the legal section - https://web.archive.org/web/20230204131826/https://github.co...
> No video files are stored in this repository. The repository simply contains user-submitted links to publicly available video stream URLs, which to the best of our knowledge have been intentionally made publicly by the copyright holders. If any links in these playlists infringe on your rights as a copyright holder, they may be removed by sending a pull request or opening an issue. However, note that we have no control over the destination of the link, and just removing the link from the playlist will not remove its contents from the web. Note that linking does not directly infringe copyright because no copy is made on the site providing the link, and thus this is not a valid reason to send a DMCA notice to GitHub. To remove this content from the web, you should contact the web host that's actually hosting the content (not GitHub, nor the maintainers of this repository).
This is a collection of publicly available TV streams from all over the world. What could possibly be there that violates DMCA?
My thought is someone owning the rights to something in CountryB, but CountryA’s TV service is openly broadcasting it, which is fine if you’re in CountryA, but not elsewhere.
Just checked a copy of repo (won't link here). A lot of cable-only channels that are definitely not offered to the public. It seems that the repository accepts any and all links, including links that definitely smells unauthorized (IP-only stream links that correspond to residential IPs in eastern Europe or south-east Asia, most legitimate free IPTV streams are hosted either in Akamai or IBM's whatever-they-call-Ustream-now).
https://web.archive.org/web/20230204131826/https://github.co...
Shortly before takedown
This discussion [1] on another repository of the same account seems to be related. Apparently "the first message on both repositories was DMCA takedown, then for some reason it was changed".
How come a compilation of pubic streams is eligible for DMCA? Lets wait to get the DMCA notice to be available, it could be either of following 1. Somebody mistakenly/intentionally added a malicious stream. 2. Or DMCA notice is fraud.
In my experience, it always the 2nd one. There are law firms and agencies randomly taking down stuff on internet with their faulty scripts and crawlers.
People will DMCA anything. If some copyright monopolist gets offended by something on the internet it will get DMCA'd out of existence. Whether it's actually fair, just or even legal has no bearing whatsoever. They face no punishment for infringing other people's rights with frivolous claims because you'd have to prove they deliberately acted in bad faith and even that would require people to hire expensive lawyers to do it. In other words, they can leverage the justice system to arbitrarily silence others and then hide behind incompetentence and indiscrimination as an excuse.
I would recommend avoiding making contributions on GitHub. If you want an account for search and whatnot fine, but I had an account with hundreds of stars killed. They said it was because I created a second account. I said they could delete the second account, or I would do it. They refused to accept this suggestion and are keeping both banned.
What's worse is they also kill every single issue, PR and comment you've ever posted. It's quite cruel and unnecessary.
Woah, what? I have a GitHub account for work, and one for personal stuff. (Separation of church and state is a good idea)
Are you saying, I could get both nuked if they find out it's the same person?
Nah, completely allowed: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
This exactly. I have three accounts, private, public, work.
GitHub asking for one account? Crazy.
As above, it's allowed: https://docs.github.com/en/account-and-profile/setting-up-an...
When you are a platform as big as them, you can only do this so much before it crosses a line into antitrust.
Biden's Administration just hired a ton of anti-trust lawyers.
Unfortunately its a sad fact that the people making these decisions are the people who don't have the natural sense to not do this in the first place for the simple reason that the behavior drives negative sentiment and outcomes in the long run for little if any net benefit.
They need to make Executives personally liable for stuff like this, otherwise they won't learn that they can't get away (it costs them something) as opposed to a business as usual slap on the wrist with the behavior baked into sales.
This is about as far from antitrust as you can get. It’s fine to think you know things, but you don’t.
> This is about as far from antitrust you can get.
Not really, no.
No DMCA notice is posted, its simply a vague you broke our ToS but we're not going to tell you how or why so you can correct it according to the mods, and then the non-response for 9 days.
Github owns Microsoft, Microsoft has an interest in Content, IPTV like many other technologies can potentially be used by people and businesses for a wide variety of legal uses.
If a business closes an account for cause, you say why, you allow access to the maintainers to migrate (if its not a legal issue), and you keep the account closed.
If you don't say why, block access immediately, and don't provide a legitimate reason, you could be in violation of the Sherman act either directly, or more often via third-party liability when it comes to open source.
I'm not a lawyer, but I know that much, its far from clear that its not antitrust, and on a more personal note, you should be more careful with those snipes. Its against the HN ToS after all.
There must be more to this situation?
What would you recommend instead?
anything that is self-hosted is not gonna go down by way of someone else you have no control over
Looks like there were a few take-downs.
This repo was taken down last week:
https://torrentfreak.com/mpa-pluto-tv-m3u-playlists-facilita...
Which contained links to pluto tv's channels.
I’ve just found out about this IPTV thing just last week and it’s down. Strangely feels like it’s my fault. They don’t want me to watch nice things. Enjoyed watching local tourism & attraction channel called BeachTV. It was comfy. It’s sad it’s gone now. Wish I knew about it some time ago,
the channels are still working. you can download the playlists from archive.org or another mirror of the repo (which i am sure exists somewhere)
First link found for a mirror: https://gitlab.com/MineCommander/iptv
If this was a DMCA takedown they need to file a counter notice, at which point I believe GitHub will reinstate them. Unless it's glaringly obvious that the original claim was abusive AFAIK the law doesn't give any leeway.
And what is iptv?
Came for this. I vaguely sort of got it before, let's Streisand this bad boy
well yeah, a list of dodgy tv streams, most of which aren't authorised by the channels, is bound to get taken down eventually