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.
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.
It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.
Content moderation is not censorship, and Nitter has no right to to use accounts to scrape and republish information that X has chosen to gate.
Content moderation is censorship (sometimes more egregious than others, but all ultimately censorship).
It's just not government censorship.
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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 :(
Thing is, X has actually paid people to tweet.
(It made everything worse if you ask me but they did do it.)
> 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?
They don't. Maybe they could get away with the ToC change but probably not without backlash. It is not relevant to the legal situation right now.
> What does X's User Retention of Content Ownership clause do?
> The clause states: “You retain your rights to any Content, including anything referenced therein, you submit, input, create, generate, post, or display on or through the Services. What's yours is yours — you own your Content.”
https://conductatlas.com/platform/x/x-terms-of-service/provi...
I don’t know why you’re getting downvoted. If they say “you’re giving us your copyright when you press the POST button” then that would seem to be that.
Seems like a bad place for them to be, given the whole argument of “you can’t sue us for what other people said on our platform, that’s not our speech!” but that seems complicated and IANAL.
> If they say “you’re giving us your copyright when you press the POST button” then that would seem to be that.
Fyi this is illegal at least in the EU.
NY Times would get you for copyright infringement, but X has no copyright in the content on X.
Yes, but that's not a high hurdle to clear. All Twitter has to do is have an exclusive content program, and now they have standing to sue for copyright infringement on those exclusively-licensed Tweets. The burden falls on Nitter instance hosters to filter that out. And there is no legal obligation on Twitter to actually provide reliable signals to block exclusively licensed content.
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Given caching, blocking, userscripts, etc., most client things are have things built in that are effectively smart proxies or glorified layer 7 application gateways.
You can write your own client for arbitrary services. You can run your own client on your own hardware, and you can host your client on someone else's hardware. Your client can render the content however it likes. You can have someone else do the work to render it like you like it and run that, locally or remotely.
There are a lot of ways to get to an "apparatus" that's analogous to both nitter and to a proxy for nytimes that ensure consuming public comments by other users doesn't suck.
As far as I know, there's no law requiring billboards to be seen by all drivers using the public road it sits beside, nor requiring all web clients to render ads. As far as I know, in most of the world there's no law saying users can't buy DNS or proxy or application firewall or ad blocking services from a third party -- services that can run between you and host, on your router, on your device at various OS levels, or as extensions to your browser.
On the contrary, there seem to be increasing numbers of laws requiring servers to deliver their content to arbitrary clients even when a firm makes its own servers, content, and preferred client devices and wishes to "protect the user's experience" or whatever the firm's justification might be.
Given a decade or two of marketing the "public square", other people's public posts, intended for public consumption, and expected to reach the public, picking that content as worthy of banning "useragents" should be shaky ground. Should be an interesting battleground for digital rights.
It's enough to wonder if a reason to go after the nitters is to establish misfortunate legal precedent using a target that can't defend itself?
Clients are not proxies. The fundamental difference is who accesses the target server. If you’re using a client (in the sense of a local program that renders your request, like a browser or a browser with extensions) then you are the one accessing the information, and once you have that information it’s hard to make a legal argument against transforming it however you want for your own consumption.
But a proxy means you request information from someone else, not from the target server, and the proxy requests from the target server. This is also fine! Except: a) the target server can absolutely say “Proxy A is not allowed to access me.” [1] and b) if the target server has copyright on the material being requested, then the proxy may be violating that copyright by making the data available for your request.
[1] there’s a weird middle ground here where if a server can tell you’re using a client it doesn’t like, then technically it could use its arbitrary denial ability to deny access on that basis, but that doesn’t seem to be legally accepted? IANAL. Or maybe that just doesn’t happen because there’s no way for it to tell what client you’re using. They certainly do try to deny service when they can figure out you’re using an ad-blocker.
They just need to rename to nitter.ai, and it would be "legal".
nitter.si
Twitter doesn't own content generated by users, the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
who owns the content generated by the users? what if i as a user give twitter sole rights to my content
It’s owned by the person who created it with a non exclusive licence granted to X.
then they would be legally viable for the content on the website, the only reason why youtube, twitter can exist is because they do not own the user content for exactly this reason.
> the only legal hurdle would be complying with takedown requests.
If you mean 'takedown requests' related to X content that should not be a problem since nitter does not cache content so anything taken down by X is inaccessible to nitter. If you mean takedown requests for nitter instances the question is on what grounds those requests are made - TOS violations or legal grounds? If it is the former it would be easy for X to just block the user IDs and no takedown request is needed. If it is the latter, which laws would those be based on?
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?
Of course it can run legally. What might not be possible is to open a running instance to the general public, certainly not to paying public but an argument could be made that even allowing free access would violate some law or other. This is not a certainty though and the continued existence of products like Opera Mini speak against there being such legal prohibitions to allowing public access to content-changing proxies.
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.
I was following along with your sentiment until the last, childish paragraph which really took the wind out of the sails.
I guess your point is you support things, not on a legal /impartial basis but on your perception of underdog/righteousness. Also, people who don't understand your initial post are psychopaths.
Fair enough, but that's a pretty shaky foundation upon which to build the law.
> 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.
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> 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.
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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?
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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.
you are weak as is your entire bloodline
I understand. I think that when faced with specific examples that refute my claim, I’d also prefer to shy away from addressing them and instead only reply to the final sentence of the post which was the least important.