I am the developer of a project with a small community known as Offflix. Now I recently discovered that Yts has an api, and it is too irresistible for me to integrate it into my project as a simple in app click to download any movie.
So, would doing that and making the code open source be illegal? I am not a US citizen and I am not technically ripping movies, I am just packaging yts’s functionality inside my app. Would github flag and destroy me repo if I do this?
Probably a bad idea. If you really wanted to do it, you should add plug-in support to your main project, then create a separate repo, maybe under a different account, with the potentially illegal yts download plug-in. That way only the plug-in repo would get DMCAed and could be mirrored by other people, or hosted off GitHub.
I think the way lots of projects handle something like that is to add a plugin system to the main project, and then offer it as a plugin in a different repo.
GitHub definitely would and has in the past. YouTube-dl is on GitHub and gets a pass because it is used by researchers and archivists, both are fair use. forgejo.org would let you be your own fedi-github and might be worth checking out (could be easier than designing a plugin system and additional repos).
The reason they were banned on leetx is because they sold out their user email lists to an anti-piracy law firm which tried to extort money from people. I wouldn’t trust people like that. I especially would be wary of subjecting users to people like that. Torrent freak has coverage if you care to search.
