This is typical behaviour for companies like these.
The app here is just another weather app taking data from the european weather models and national weather services. This data was created by taxpayer money and is most of the time available for free via APIs from national weather services (although "API" often means "a daily file dump on an FTP").
Then these companies take this free data, build an app around it and monetize it.
In this recent court case in nearby Germany, ad-supported weather apps sued the German national weather service to take down the official free weather app. The national weather service was forced to make their app paid due to this ruling.
The APIs and data dumps for corporate customers have to remain available, though.
Nowadays I refuse to use any private weather apps. Private weather apps take public data, fill it with ads, and then sell it back to us. I say: Fuck them.
ReVanced is more like a patch manager. The patches come from a separate repo which contains patches for more than YouTube. You'd find Twitter, TikTok, Twitch and much more. The issue is that someone accepted a PR for a patch a "premium" weather app. The DMCA takedown request came from the weather app's owners.
Revanced YouTube itself, yes. But the revanced project also removes ads and adds features to many other apps, including some weather apps. And one of those got Revanced taken down.
More context: It's a successor to Vanced, a patched Android YouTube client that, among other things, disabled ads. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/YouTube_Vanced?wprov=sfla1 ReVanced apparently had patches for more apps, which seems to have contributed to the takedown.
They really shouldn't though, it would be kind of mean to Codeberg to host potentially illegal software there.
It's really not that complicated to get a domain and host your own instance of Gitea, and it would make it a lot more resilient to takedowns, if you have the right domain registrar and instance host.
That's awesome. Would be cool if there was a hidden git service with monero payments for storage. I don't really know anything about the opsec necessary for such a thing.
I feel like using git for a sensitive code distribution is a poor idea. Git exposes rather a lot of information about you, from basic ones like username to a history of commits (what if you accidentally committed something revealing PII?)
It's much better to simply distribute code as a tar.gz archive or something.
I mean, if you're going so far as to set up git as a tor service, it probably isn't that much more work to obfuscate or just delete user info from commits.
But I'm not sure a vcs is what you'd want anyway. It might make more sense to just host a zip of the most recent branch state instead of exposing the history
Popularity I assume - people will be less hesitant to download an apk file from github, even if being on github doesn't really make it trustable in practical terms.
Well yes, they're called "private". Often either illegal, it offends some powerful people or the creator doesn't give a shit and may just post a link on a forum as a thanks.
Respect to those who put it out in the open! A DMCA is nothing, but people have died and even went to prison for a cool gray area program.
One of the reasons why the original vanced was taken down was because it was advertised way too frequently and publicly. These projects should always be disseminated by word of mouth (hn/reddit does not count)
Correct me if I am wrong: the DMCA takedown process was not designed for circumvention devices - this is what courts are for.
This company is not the copyright holder to these patches - they did not write them nor are they derivative works, so they need to use other legal means to approach this situation.
This is not first time this has happened with GitHub.
The weather data that the circumvention provides access to is not copy righted though right? From other comments I gather it comes from public data and is not the companies.
If so it would not meet the criteria in the first sentence of your link:
> The Copyright Act also prohibits the circumvention of technological measures that effectively control access to works protected by copyright.
That is an interesting corner case, not sure if it is a bug or a feature.
That isn't so obvious to me. For all intents and purposes this is no different from crack. I am not sure if DMCA is right tool but I totally understand why Microsoft wouldn't want to host it.
My understanding was that `revanced-patches` contained just that: patches. The patches themselves are applied to the target apps on the end user device, so revanced doesn't need to host prepatched binaries that they don't own the copyright to.
Other moral or legal issues aside, this is a pretty clear abuse of the DMCA as far as I understand it.
No, Revanced only has the patches themselves in the repo, there's zero source code or binary or anything copyright related belonging to Google here, the DMCA is invalid.
> Please describe the nature of your copyright ownership or authorization to act on the owner's behalf.
> We (Garzotto GmbH together with Kachelmann GmbH) are the owner of the product "Pflotsh ECMWF", a weather app for which a subscription can be purchased on Google Play. I am [private], [private] of Garzotto GmbH and submit this request on behalf of Garzotto GmbH
> Please provide a detailed description of the original copyrighted work that has allegedly been infringed. If possible, include a URL to where it is posted online.
So let's get this right, a Swiss company abusing the fact that Github is US hosted is using a Copyright claim mechanism for US based copyright holders (DMCA) to claim that the entire app is 'illegal™' because someone found a way to get their weather forecasts without a paying subscription.
"Anti-circumvention Technology" DMCA claims are absolute horseshit. If you follow this ad ridiculum then curl and ffmpeg should also be 'illegal™' technology.
> So let's get this right, a Swiss company abusing the fact that Github is US hosted is using a Copyright claim mechanism for US based copyright holders (DMCA) to claim that the entire app is 'illegal™' because someone found a way to get their weather forecasts without a paying subscription.
An european copyright claim would result in the same thing. Just because GitHub want DCMA takedowns doesn't remove the fact that this would be taken down no matter what.
It's not that someone found a way, it's that they're sharing that. Pirating software from small companies and single developers is a massive low.
I have no access to what the patch content is (As it has been taken down).
But if indeed it is a key/crack to access the companies' weather forecasts it is still a massive hyperbole and overreach to claim that the whole app is _illegal_ as it is claimed.
They aren't claiming the whole app is illegal. Two people have claimed that repo contains cracks. The entire repo that has been taken is basically just for patches for apps to get around premium controls. The ReVanced app repo is not affected nor is the org account. Just one repo that seems to have the sole purpose of providing cracks.
Does it? It's obviously US legislation, but I'd wager there are trade agreements between EU (or others) and US that require the EU to honor this legislation.
Pick a European hosting provider that knows what they're doing and they're more than likely to ignore DMCA claims as they aren't legally binding in the EU
I'm not necessarily rooting for the ReVanced project here, but… this takedown notice is supposedly claiming circumvention of access controls to copyrighted content? Since when is weather data copyrightable? Unlike what happens in Europe, the US doesn't recognise separate "database rights" either.
The repo was distributing patches for non-YouTube apps as well; specifically AnyTracker[0] and Pflotsch ECMWF[1]. Both of these patches appear to have been disablers for the Google Play License checks to permit usage of their respective "premium" version and both developers filed takedowns.
Suprisingly not Google (the original Vanced) or the MPAA (youtube-dl) this time.
No wonder ReVanced got taken down on GitHub, the chances are that someone from YouTube issued a DMCA takedown, or it could just be any youtuber knowing that their content on YouTube was going without ads on android.
GitHub has to take action, and here we are with ReVanced being taken down.
I don't take this as a surprise, GitHub will take action if people write to them or send them a DMCA takedown.
And nothing of value was lost. If you want ad-free services, you can absolutely afford to chip in some money to the service provider, which keeps things above-board and legit. Don't be a darn cheapskate.
Please point us towards an ad-free paying service that doesn't simultaneously track your profile/views/clicks? The problem at the moment is that there is no multimedia host that actually just hosts, they all track unique customer habits chasing that recommendation engine big data gravy train.
Also reminder that most copyright infringement is from non-industrialized nations where people indeed cannot afford to 'chip in some money to the service provider'.
You can't make a business out of everything. By the same reasoning you could argue for banning breathing because it prevents a potential canned-air market.
Because it costs money to provide services? You could not argue that with the same reasoning, because there is no labor involved for air to exist. However services need to be run by people using hardware created by other people, all of whom need to eat, which is only possible with money.
So why not "Don't do it at all" for accessing the content if you do not want to pay for it? You feel entitled to receive it on your terms, but other people are not allowed to only offer something on their terms?
Sure I do, because I can and I make sure to exercise that power and freedom as much as possible. They're the ones who try to control us, using their copyrights and monopolies and lobbying to restrict our freedom and rob us of our rights. I refuse to accept that.
I don't even object to paying. I spend truly ridiculous amounts of money on stuff like this, despite my belief that copyright should be abolished and my knowledge of the fact I'm getting a worse product compared to the pirate, because at the end of the day I do believe in paying money for the things I like. You just need to have the basic decency to name your price. If you try to steal my attention and auction it off to the highest bidder as if it was your property, I will unconditionally block you with extreme prejudice.
I first had internet access in 1998 as a 12 year old without any money. It became a habit to find anything for free: mp3's on metager's "index of" searches, cracks on astalavista.box.sk, movies on IRC bots, 0 day software and games from scene FTPs, later on the whole P2P stuff like gnutella, DC++, torrent etc. and in the mid 00's the move to shared hosters.
The fact that I was 12 and didn't get pocket money made me find all my stuff for free and it sticked to this day, except it's either waaaaaaay more convenient to pay a few bucks, or impossible to get otherwise.
So over the years I stopped with my 500GB MP3/AAC/FLAC music collection and moved to Spotify (Which I still hate, because there's always indie stuff that isn't available PLUS stuff they remove, without informing me!). I also stopped pirating movies for some time because of Netflix, but after the democratization of streaming services and the return to walled off exclusives on multiple platforms, I simply went back to torrent streaming.
Software is another thing I ALWAYS pirate, the only exception if I use it professionally or make money in any other form by using it.
I am not proud of this, but saving a few bucks seems to be more important to me when I can. This is probably, because it has been ingrained into my brain for years as a child.
I worked in the Digital Marketing business for 10 years (AdTech and MarTech) especially working in Analytics and Data Collection and I never saw ads. Used modified youtube clients for years, uBLock Origin on Desktop AND mobile. Seeing the unfiltered web on friend's devices makes me wonder how they can even brows the web...
Blocking ads on YouTube doesn't affect anyone's bottom line except Google. Creators on YouTube only receive a small percentage of YouTube ad revinue, and most don't count it as stable income because YouTube loves to demonitize videos for no reason and you have almost no recourse once it does.
That's why every video now has embedded ads, which is something entirely different because it's controlled by and paid to the creator directly.
I don't mind giving creators money, and I'm fortunate enough that I can afford to subscribe to several of them every month. Because they deserve my money, not Google.
The data this company has put behind a paywall is the european weather model, which was developed with tax payer money, is run with tax payer money, and the data of which is almost entirely available for free to anyone that wants to access the data.
Companies like the one that posted this take down notice actually sued (!) the national weather services in a few EU countries to prevent national weather services from publishing weather data to consumers for free, arguing that the weather service should run free APIs, but these companies should be able to build ad and subscription supported apps using these free APIs.
I don't see any value in dozens of different, bad, private apps rehashing the same weather report data.
That the law values the rights of those companies to rent-seek higher than the right of citizens to be informed is extremely dangerous. The same reasoning could be applied to news, laws, or even firefighting.
Some services should just be provided by the state and not by private companies.
The app here is just another weather app taking data from the european weather models and national weather services. This data was created by taxpayer money and is most of the time available for free via APIs from national weather services (although "API" often means "a daily file dump on an FTP").
Then these companies take this free data, build an app around it and monetize it.
https://www.dwd.de/DE/presse/pressemitteilungen/DE/2020/2020...
In this recent court case in nearby Germany, ad-supported weather apps sued the German national weather service to take down the official free weather app. The national weather service was forced to make their app paid due to this ruling.
The APIs and data dumps for corporate customers have to remain available, though.
Nowadays I refuse to use any private weather apps. Private weather apps take public data, fill it with ads, and then sell it back to us. I say: Fuck them.