Comment by petcat
18 hours ago
The software project itself is probably fine, but the legal risk is always going to be with the person that hosts it with the intention of facilitating the unauthorized access of Twitter's website. Seems like that could run afoul of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act.
Those people should seek their own legal advice.
The project maintainer, Zedeus, runs the most or second-most popular instance, and I assume his lawyers decided that was okay.
Host the infra in countries unfriendly to the US and its legal framework apparatus. Continually package the archive as torrents for distribution globally.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49567595
X already knows who the maintainer is and could easily go after him.
They will have to prove he’s operating it, and someone else can orchestrate. Anna’s Archive, Z Lib, Archive.today, Tor exit node patterns.
Put a tip jar out, let’s get archiving. “You can just do things.”
Except this is settled case law. LinkedIn tried and lost against scrapers.
That was a case of scraping explicitly public data that was already available to the general public without any extra effort.
Which is exactly what Twitter is?
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I think that this is different because Nitter uses real X accounts for scraping, rather than publicly available data.
That is still a form of publicly available.
Explain to me why that matters at all in an ethical sense. Especially given the scraping / pirating that's gone on by all of these companies in the last number of years.
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