Comment by dawnerd

9 hours ago

Whats illegal about it? The one vague Texas law that was in the original C&D? Everything else was just TOS violation.

8 comments

dawnerd

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ButlerianJihad  3 hours ago

There are aspects of copyright and CFAA that could, hypothetically, be brought to bear on this as well.

IANAL, but most of the copyrights are held by the X users, X having sublicensed it. It is unlikely that X users would band together and sue Nitter, and X doesn't really have the standing for takedowns or lawsuits on those grounds.

IIUC, nitter is acting as a proxy-gateway and using authorized user accounts to do it through the API. It's essentially opening up access for unauthenticated, unauthorized persons, to content that they would not otherwise be able to access. Imagine if I established a service that granted authenticated proxy access to Bill Gates' online banking app. Or a service that proxies GitHub by means of a very prominent user account, that has commit access to significant repos in the public supply chain.

I believe that even HN commenters could see the legal flaws in such services; no matter how much they covet Bill Gates' money. nitter and friends are essentially doing the same crimes, on a read-only, low-grade low-stakes sort of way, but the victims are a very high-profile platform plus all their users. We do not appreciate these hijinks.

bragr  9 hours ago

Violating a contract is illegal. It's just not necessarily a crime.

  • therealpygon  5 hours ago

    > illegal No, it’s not. Liability isn’t legality. There is nothing illegal in violating a ToS, nor is it a crime. Violating a ToS makes you liable under some other terms of that same agreement. That is very different from being “illegal”.

  • chimeracoder  8 hours ago

    > Violating a contract is illegal.

    If you have entered into the contract and are even party to it in the first place, which is not clear in this case and is likely going to be one of the questions litigated here.

    • gruez  8 hours ago

      Didn't the guy run an instance himself? Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable so that's one way he "agreed" to the terms. Also even if he didn't, as a matter of practicality he probably needed to connect to the site to develop nitter , which exposes him there too.

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