Comment by raphman
2 days ago
Not much detail so far.
> We have received cease and desist letters. Awaiting legal advice at the moment, but for now expect all nitter instances to remain down for the foreseeable future.
[for all those who - like me - first check the comments before clicking on the link]
They should respond with a poop emoji, which is what Musk sends to people he doesn't care about.
Musk can afford to be childish about legal challenges because the outcome doesn't really matter to him.
You're 100% correct, but but it's exactly the sort of thing that would cause him to go on a tear and say something admissible.
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I hate how a jerk like him can tie up the courts with frivolous lawsuits while regular people have their cases slowed down for things that actually matter.
Are they expecting legal advice to take a long tine?! It's fairly reasonable to check with a lawyer first, before damaging yourself by complying.
The legal system gets this concept. Otherwise random, unwarranted desist orders from your enemies could break you.
Anyone can send an request.
Weird.
Legal advice costs a lot of money unless you find a lawyer doing it for free, which is rare.
I agree with the spirit of your comment though. More resistance would be a good thing. It’s just unfortunate how it seems to cost like $20k to $100k.
Nitter should put up a request for donations for legal fees. Lots of people are willing.
Somebody asked about that on the GitHub thread. You can donate at https://liberapay.com/zedeus or https://patreon.com/nitter.
They also take crypto (see Donations section in the project readme)
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This seems like the sort of case the EFF should take up: https://www.eff.org/pages/legal-assistance
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Yes and it's not like there hasn't been ton of precedent for scraping recently, including by X themselves, so why would they expect to not be able to win this?
Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you."
However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D. And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
> Anyone can send an request.
As for emails, I think BIMI has solved this for some time now, at least for large companies.
> Getting legal advice can absolutely take a long time, and the first thing they'll probably tell most people in this situation is "turn it off for now until we can do more research and collect money from you."
Normally I would agree, but Nitter has been an adversarial integration from the start. I would expect them to have anticipated this attack.
> However, C&D's don't really carry any legal weight in the US to my knowledge... but I don't see any harm in complying ahead of time just to be safe. The only "damage" I can see is just by nature of the service being down temporarily.
Which is significant damage. By complying too eagerly you give those notices power that they would not otherwise have.
> If there is even a possibility that a court may find the service violating a law, I think the legal advisor would likely say to just leave the service down unless you have many tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars or more to fight it... you can most likely avoid the entire lawsuit altogether just by complying with the C&D.
If you're of that mindset why create Nitter in the first place. And they are pretty much guaranteed public (including financial support) for any lawsuit if they ask for it since Nitter is something a lot of people want to exist.
> And this kind of suit is one that can easily ruin your company or even personal life... so avoiding it seems smart.
It's ultimately not that smart when you're in the "business" of creating Nitter because it just tells the bullies that all that's needed is a nicely formatted letter and you'll fold.
"only damage". That's the damage. Five 9s is a thing, because being down means you lose market, your brand is harmed, and no one wants to use you. No one complies with 'cease and desist' orders before seeing if there's any meat at all. No one.
And the legal system "gets that". Reasonable compliance isn't "Oh, someone sent me a C&D. I should destroy my entire business on the off change it makes sense to do so. I'll just raze everything to the ground, hoping that it's better than just... having everything razed to the ground through a suit."
Just.. no. The legal system knows that due diligence is not simply complying, but instead taking time to validate the claim, see if it makes sense, and so on. After all, if the matter were truly urgent, an injunction could easily be obtained.
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From Nitter matrix group:
basically, it demands that I:
1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository, and delete all "X Data" in both 2. Stop all use of the "Twitter" and "X" marks 3. Cease all access to X data, including copies 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens 5. Confirm compliance in writing within three business days
The claims asserted are breach of X's Terms of Service, Developer Agreement and Developer Policy; the Texas Harmful Access by Computer Act; and the Lanham Act. It threatens litigation against me personally. X states it has also sent notice to GitHub and to my domain registrar.
So much free speech.
A new case where the "free as in speech, not free as in beer" clarification helps.
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The global town square is locked up in a gated community.
Is this what free speech absolutism looks like?
> 1. Permanently take down nitter.net and the GitHub repository[...]
This is the one that they know they have absolutely no grounds to demand, which is why they started with it. Everything else can be conformed with without even really damaging Nitter (the project.)
> 4. Delete all X account credentials and session tokens
could be trouble for individual servers, but is on legally shaky ground, and servers can simply go down at the first strong challenge and open back up under another name. Nitter the project doesn't need to have any credentials or tokens.
Why not use those three days (or any time that can still be considered reasonable to respond to this) to contact the EFF before responding by taking down the site?
"For the forseeable future" doesn't sound very good. It's a vague phrase, but it usually isn't used to describe something that will change next week or even next month.
"For the time being" would have sounded like less bad wording than "for the forseeable future."