Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help
nitter.net291 points by ForHackernews 5 hours ago
291 points by ForHackernews 5 hours ago
Lookup eBay vs BiddersEdge. BE was scraping eBay's site, eBay sued, eBay won on "trespass to chattles" legal grounds. eBay, as owner of the servers BE was scraping, has the right to prevent anyone from accessing those servers. Whether eBay "owns" the data is not relevant; they own the servers being accessed.
I just asked Gemini "do X's TOS allow anyone to access X via the api?" and it said "No", with a long list of conditions for accessing X via their API.
Nitter should give up and call it a day.
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly legal things. The chilling effect on speech is the whole point
This is very clearly an attempt by X to use the legal system to harass people doing perfectly reasonable things, but are you sure they are legal? I would assume that is against the ToS and I don't think the law makes an exception for cases like this (IANAL of course).
Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.
In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
X cannot expect anyone to behave in accordance with terms and conditions they never agreed to.
We need to revise the law around terms of service, we are allowing companies to impose all kinds of monopolistic, anti competitive, user hostile, privacy invasion, and other measures against the public interest simply by burying provision in a wall of text they know no one will understand even if they read it.
> In other words, if X has a public API and Nitter is using it, then neither Nitter themselves nor the Nitter users have to agree to any terms of service in order to do so.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
(IANAL) That's copyright law and not contract law. Perhaps X could try to put a clause in its ToS that publishing content there grants the copyright to itself, but I'm pretty sure it won't be accepted well even if it's legal.
What are you talking about, specifically?
Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?
That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.
Whats illegal about it? The one vague Texas law that was in the original C&D? Everything else was just TOS violation.
Violating a contract is illegal. It's just not necessarily a crime.
> 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.
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.
I think the click wrap license agreement needs to be revised. Companies are abusing it almost universally.
> Clickwrap licenses are generally held to be enforceable
Sort of. Depends on the jurisdiction, and it's not always the case. That's why this is likely to be one of the core topics litigated in this case.
Nobody on HN is going to know the answer here at this point.
Can you expand on why you think this has a chilling effect on speech?
It's impossible to know what this "legal advice" was, but it was always a dubious claim.
The software project itself is probably fine. 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 and not listen to anything this guy says.
I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
>I was misled by an individual who claimed to be helping the Nitter project pro bono with a team of lawyers. He made up a timeline of events that sounded mostly believable.
I want to believe this was a case of incompetency on their part rather than malice because wow, that's a horrible thing to do.
Wouldn't be unprecedented. Megamind Musk got scammed out of $ 50.000,- USD by someone claiming to be a PI on then Twitter [0], despite having access to (as near as makes no difference) infinite investigatory resources. If someone claimed to be a pro bono legal team, a less affluent project threatened by letters from high class lawyers, could easily fall for that and I could easily see it be malicious. Maybe trolls, maybe investors wanting to help SpaceXAI or whatever it is called today, maybe someone wishing to convert into donations/crypto rug pull, etc. Could also be incompetence after all, but maliciousness isn't without priors.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/report-musks-500...
Nitter is/was a free, open-source alternative front-end for X (formerly Twitter) that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts.
> that lets users view public posts without an account, ads, or tracking scripts
what’s the mechanism they use to get this content?
HTTP. They just load the page while logged in to one of the server's accounts.
I don’t think nitter can run legally. It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn. I think its (or systems like it) only possible future is to acknowledge it doesn’t have a legal future.
There is a strong distinction between news articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
So I don't think nytimes, or cnn is an apt comparison.
It's more like your cellular provider claiming intellectual ownership over the web you browsed and conversations you read when people start sharing their downloaded pages.
> articles authored by or on behalf of a company, versus user generated content.
It gives me both a sense of schadenfreude but also a deep depression to watch the shoe on the other foot.
It was only a couple years ago that the talking point was "It's a private company!!", used to defend mass censorship on old Twitter, defend delisting of Parler on app stores, etc.
I think this is really something considering the whole ”social media is not responsible for what ppl post” thing
yea, there's also the fact the public entities have chosen to use this avenue for disseminating legal information
you can "de facto" a lot from this arrangement :(
> It would be like having a proxy for nytimes or cnn
It's a much grayer area, considering NYTimes owns their content and x does not own the content they serve. I think this question deserves zealous representation.
> does not own the content they serve
Do they not? And if they wanted to, couldn't they, pretty trivially, with a ToC change?
NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.
Twitter doesn't own content generated by users, the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
The legal future is whatever people fight for being legal. You see entities that are hostile to humanity making the laws they want all the time, why be so defeatist?
Normally I'd agree, but in this case the people on the other end of the issue rarely care about how vague the legality of something is before going forward with it, so I think it's only reasonable to extend the same logic to nitter.
I don't see how that makes any sense whatsoever.
If one party is reckless in legal terms, then that's their right and they will bear the consequences. It's generally considered to be a bad attitude to have, which is why people generally don't have it, and I'm going to need an explanation on how wishing that onto Nitter isn't in practice wanting someone else to burn at the stake to spite a third party, especially given the enormous difference in economical, and as a result legal standing on both of those entities.
Said more explicitly, wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
It is not my wish for nitter to shoulder any more burden than they can reasonably carry, which at this point unfortunately seems zero.
What I'm stating is that I'd normally be against a project like nitter on moral grounds had it been targeting a forum such as mineralenthusiasts.com that required you to log in to view posts, but since the counterparty in this case is a habitual bad actor extending the same goodwill to them only empowers them, and it would be best for nitter to function as much as it can unless its illegality is established in court.
I could accuse you of things as equally unpleasant as psychopathy for making me spell this out, which I had hoped would be incredibly obvious from my original comment, but I'll refrain from doing so.
> wanting some random guy who made a project to risk aspects of their livelihood to spite Elon Musk because you don't like him is psychopathic.
Speaking only for myself: I agree with the spirit of this statement (perhaps minus the use of the word “psychopathic”).
However, it seems like the author of Nitter wants to continue to engage in this risky activity, and is requesting resources to help. If they ever wish to stop developing Nitter/XCancel, I will absolutely respect that. But assuming they wish to continue, I consider supporting them and doing my part to frustrate a man-child, unrepentant fascist, and murderer of thousands a noble thing to do.
> Do my part to frustrate a man-child.
Who’s the man-child here though? Elon is running multiple companies, spread his DNA and ideas everywhere, and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
And then there’s you. Who believes it’s “noble” to frustrate someone you don’t like. In reality, you’re not frustrating anyone but yourself.
So I ask again.. who’s the man child? Elon? Or you?
And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business, and doing his thing? Or the guy who desperately wants to tell that man what to do?
> Elon is running multiple companies,
So? Nothing about that is inherently noble.
> spread his DNA and ideas everywhere
Much to my dismay. Most of his ideas have a long track record of being drastically incorrect or dangerous. And he treats his children like shit, so much that at least one of his children wants nothing to do with him. Also “spreads his DNA everywhere” is a really weird way to talk about how many children he has.
> and makes a very real impact on the world every day.
Agreed. He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life. But since we don’t live in a just world, I’m trying to do my (admittedly extremely small) part in correcting that.
> And who’s the fascist? The man minding his own business,
This is a hilariously wrong way to describe him. The fascist is the man who sieg heil’ed, twice, in front of a large audience, and then backed it up via every politically-related action he’s taken since then.
> In a just world, he’d be behind bars for the rest of his pathetic life.
Everyone is well aware that the fascistic, violent, envious left wants everyone who won’t say a man wearing a dress is a woman in prison or dead. Really weird hill to die on, but the left did die there.
The good news for me and all the other people who didn’t descend into severe mental illness when Trump was elected is that you don’t matter and can’t do anything.
Elon just can’t stop mattering, and can’t stop doing very real things. Literal opposite of your average marxist.
> He certainly impacted the millions of people he murdered running DOGE.
Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying, and your statements are so hyperbolic that it’s not worth continuing in good faith. I’d welcome a good faith conversation if you change your mind.
> Name one of the millions of people he murdered. Just one. It’s funny that you can’t. But you will go on telling huge lies on the internet anyway.
Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Elon Musk ran the “agency” that fed USAID “into the wood chipper.” He is therefore responsible for their deaths. This is murder. Please retract your statement.
Edit: here’s a bonus fifth name: Santina Sunday. This article has many paragraphs of detail about how and why she died. https://www.propublica.org/article/kenya-trump-usaid-world-f...
In short, please educate yourself and refrain from posting further fascist talking points until you do so.
> You’re not responding to anything I’m actually saying
I’m demonstrating your lack of value and your unclear thinking. My statements are plainly factual, which is why any marxist will absolutely hate them.
> Here are four: Yamah Freeman, Gbessey Kiadu, Ibrahim Koroma, Achol Deng. Please retract your statement.
None of those people were murdered by Elon Musk. So we have confirmed that you were wrong.
> In short, please educate yourself and refrain from posting further fascist talking points until you do so.
This tactic is too funny. I’m well educated, smart, and will never do what you want.
Did you spill your DNA everywhere writing this too? Or just on yourself?
If you’d like to continue believing that success is immaturity, or that freedom of speech is fascism, then that is certainly your prerogative.
Freedom of speech?
You mean like silencing users that use the term “cis” or “cisgender”? [0]
Or banning an account tracking his jet, even after explicitly stating that he was so committed to freedom of speech that he wouldn’t ban that specific account? [1]
Or complying significantly more often with suppression demands from authoritarian governments than the previous management of Twitter did? [2]
From your statements here it appears that you take everything he says at face value. I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
[0] https://www.forbes.com/sites/kimelsesser/2023/07/02/elon-mus...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ElonJet?wprov=sfti1#History
[2] https://restofworld.org/2023/elon-musk-twitter-government-or...
> I would strongly encourage you to stop doing that.
Really unconvincing argument. It’s just marxist straw grasping. I will continue on normally, but thanks for the suggestion.