What does HackerNews think of revanced-patches?

🧩 Patches for ReVanced

Language: Kotlin

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 complete repository at https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches is clearly illegal, which you see immediately if you just spend a few seconds to check it out.

I mean, this was clearly not written by a lawyer.

> 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.

> On GitHub at https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches there is a patch that unlocks the subscription without payment for "Pflotsh ECMWF" and various other products.

> What files should be taken down? Please provide URLs for each file, or if the entire repository, the repository’s URL.

> https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches

> The entire repository must be taken down. Even if our copyright considers part of it ( https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches/tree/main/src/m... ) the complete repository at https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches is clearly illegal, which you see immediately if you just spend a few seconds to check it out.

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.

The DMCA notice: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/12/2022-12-0...

And the complaint itself:

> On GitHub at https://github.com/revanced/revanced-patches there is a patch that unlocks the subscription without payment for "Pflotsh ECMWF" and various other products.

If that’s true, this can’t really be very controversial?