this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ

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[–] [email protected] 40 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Github probably didn't receive a cease and desist yet, but I doubt they'll put up a fight against Nintendo.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I highly suggest starting to familiarize ourselves with federated git repos. I‘m testing forgejo atm hoping to be able to host it publicly at some point. That way, once something is out there, its pretty much everywhere.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 8 months ago (3 children)

the issue isn't federation or anything like that, the issue is finding a repo hosting service in a dmca resilient country

[–] [email protected] 19 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Yeah, I get that. But I dont think that its possible to really dmca every fork of a repo on 20 countries without running out of resources at some point because when one fork is taken down, people will make 10 more. the important part is discoverability imo. Feel free to educate me in case this is missing a point.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

its easy enough to send angry shit to every server, dmca and whatever rights violations they can think up, and it can become an issue.

Of course, the Federation is great, but you still need an instance that's in one of those privacy-oriented countries.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

You can get chatgpt to do this. Or write a simple script.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (2 children)

-- A wild Codeberg appeared. --

Codeberg is a collaboration platform providing Git hosting and services for free and open source software, content and projects.

Website: Codeberg.org


The organization selected the European Union for their headquarters and computer infrastructure, due to members' concerns that a software project repository hosted in the United States could be removed if a malicious actor made bad faith copyright claims under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Wikipedia: Codeberg e.V.


In June 2022 the Software Freedom Conservancy's "Give Up Github" campaign (in response to the GitHub Copilot licensing controversy) promoted Codeberg as an alternative to GitHub.

Conservancy: Give Up GitHub!

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Certainly better than the U.S. in that regard but I wouldn't consider Germany "resilient" either.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Unfortunately using codeberg itself is kinda crap. Its not the worst thing in the world, but it still has zero discoverability , and is missing features like code search.

it does have potential though if it is resilient.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago (1 children)

The DMCA only applies in the US. Every other country doesn't give a shit about your DMCA request.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

and yet, they still obey them...

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

And even EU based companies will bow down to DMCA takedown demands, if they want to serve American customers.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Federated git repos doesn't mean that the source code will be replicated across instances. It just means you can do things like create tickets and pull requests across instances.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Not sure I understand. I should be able to fork a public repo across instances, no? Why bother otherwise?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Federation has nothing to do with that capability. git clone exists since the beginning of git.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

hmmmm... I see your point. Maybe I wasnt explaining my point clear enough. Right now, I cant see someones fork of some software if I'm on some gitlab which is not federated afaik. I should have said discoverability I guess. Does that make more sense?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (2 children)

I mean, not saying anyone should, because evading copyright is bad. But technically, you could run say forgejo as an onion service. Connecting git to clone from it would take some extra steps but, if hidden well it'd make it somewhat harder to take down.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 8 months ago

My man, you're commenting on the piracy community, in the piracy instance, run by a former /r/piracy mod.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago (2 children)

Evading oppressive mechanics is always a great idea imho but I digress.

I'm not really talking about making it unable to be taken down, which is already what happens when you put it in a non public repo. I'm talking about exhausting the corpo and damaging their image for going after people using software to play their bought games on their pc. It could kick off a trend of peeps shaming corpos (especially nintendo) for going after legit players who want control of their devices and property. (whoever feels like pointing out that "technically you just own a license", just dont).

[–] [email protected] 5 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Well, I run forgejo for my own stuff. So, let's say I decided to host something that is subject to a copyright complaint. As soon as people start using your repo and their lawyers get a whiff of it, they'll just take the IP of your server and DMCA the owner of the IP. Whether it be me, or the host. It's an entity they can go after and will need to yield to appropriate law. The effect would be the same as the DMCA going to Github.

But on tor, it hides the entity operating and running the server. Making it a lot harder to find the person to even send the DMCA to, let alone start the legal wheels turning, if it were ignored.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 8 months ago

Thats pretty awesome, ngl. Definitely something to keep in mind.

But think about 10.000 forks and 10.000 letters to 10.000 ips. This would create so much damage its not even funny. :)

Like a tiktok trend. „go to againstcyberoppression.com and download this hardcoded, federated forgejo instance with this repo to give nintendos lawyers something to choke on“

I bet they would give up if this goes viral!

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

I’m talking about exhausting the corpo and damaging their imag

All you'll be exhausting is an AI. They're using AIs now to write the DMCA requests, which actually does lead me to wonder if such takedown requests are even legal (an AI can't, to my knowledge, legally represent the interests of a legal person). But the point is, if you're thinking of "exhausting a corpo" you're thinking it wrong.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago (1 children)

Please tell me more why my thinking is wrong /s

[–] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

Because you are not exhausting parts that actually get exhausted, nor that can actually get a harm to reputation in their industry due to association to the corpo. If you want to go after a corpo, you go after the employees, the physical facilities (they cost money and time to rebuild / migrate) and, if possible, the jobhunters.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

When I create a fork (in the web UI) does my instance not git clone from the source instance? Not going around cloning random federated repos I can see, but...