Since we had a thread about Tachiyomi removing extentions I thought this might also be relevant.
Text version:
Tachiyomi, under the guise of 'legitimate' open-source development, has been seriously infringing on the copyright of manhwas worldwide.
We have collected personal details of most individuals involved in this project and plan to proceed with strong legal and institutional response against over 100 forked GitHub pages.
For the official English versions of KakaoPage/Kakao Webtoon, please enjoy them on Tapas!
Be Official, Be Legal Readers.
Not sure how many contributors were involved in Tachiyomi itself but it looks like they'll be aiming for any forked projects as well.
They have no case, tachiyomi is nothing but a glorified web browser, if they wanted to go after someone they need to go after the aggregators. I wonder if they just tested the waters with the take down notice of the previous list of extensions and are now subsequently pushing it further since they saw the tachiyomi team folded to their demands.
I suspect that is exactly what is happening. They saw initial success for essentially the price of a cease and desist letter. Why not keep pushing? It will be interesting if they actually file dmca claims against github repos and make github decide a course of action.
GitHub hosts Nintendo emulators, and Nintendo is insanely litigious and has a much better argument than these dumb fucks pretending they can take down a reader because piracy exists.
They'll follow the DMCA takedown process. They're required to. But they're not going to pull a YouTube and go way beyond their legal obligations to pacify big IP holders.
Yeah, it's something many people predicted as soon as news of removing extensions came out. I don't know about the main Tachiyomi team but I hope at least some of the affected contributors decides to defend themselves - otherwise we'll see more frivolous lawsuits like this.
Tapas sucks ass. I get constant errors, you don't own what you buy with their shitty coins and it's also ridiculously expensive. How about they improve their service and make their content properly available as ebooks or as a subscription service. I want to be as legal as possible, but not when the legal stuff hates their customers.
Piracy always better in the end even with supposed better service. There has never been a storefront, be it movies, books, television shows, manga that can compete with piracy. It's impossible to go against literally free.
I disagree with that sentiment. If it's free, but a hassle compared to the paid alternative, then piracy is most definitely not better for most people, unless actually don't want to pay for anything. For example, for games, it's much easier to use Steam or GOG than find cracks that may or may not work. For movies it's much easier to use Netflix or simply buy the bluray than go look for an illegal streaming site that keeps changing its URL to evade shutdowns and is full of malicious ads. Same thing with music and Spotify and the likes.
If the legal service offers a good product, most people are willing to pay for it. There will always be some that will never do that, but most will because when the legal service is good, piracy can be a big hassle.