Nitter: Update Oct 10th seeking funding and legal help
nitter.net
nitter.net
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.
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.
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.
That's not true. Publicly available source code with licenses dispute your claim.
Using software with specific licenses? Or making modifications to it?
That is substantially different from reading the public APIs.
Copyright law applies to all citizens whether or not they've agreed to a contract.
Funny enough SpaceX just ignores copyright law a lot of the time by refusing to comply with some of the GPL licenses for their dishy firmware. I think Tesla does as well to some degree. They generally publish some code but not the complete corresponding source code for the firmware they actually ship.
• Unequal Bargaining Power: A large gap in power or knowledge between a large corporation and an individual consumer or employee.
• Lack of Meaningful Choice: "Take-it-or-leave-it" adhesion contracts where the weaker party cannot negotiate any terms.
None of these so-called "agreements" should bind people. There is no actual agreement or "meeting of the minds." It's just one party writing one-sided rules that only they get to enforce.
Companies are perfectly entitled to tell people they aren't allowed to use their services anymore. That's what the C&D was. It's perfectly legal to say "here's an API anyone can use, except you, Anish Kapoor."
It's like if Reddit bans you, you aren't entitled to use the site after they've told you you're banned. Even if you can find a technical means around the ban, it's still trespass.
I would say that you are not allowed to use their site as a logged in user (i.e. upvoting, downvoting, commenting, making posts).
It does not seem logical to me that Reddit could "ban" anyone from using their public frontends as anonymous users.
They could only do something like that, in my opinion, if access to all their content was gated behind a login.
Don't give Reddit ideas.
If I ban you from my house and you show up in disguise, you may be able to get in, but you are still not entitled to be there.
It's already there:
"By using the Services, you state that: . . . You have not been permanently suspended or removed from the Services."
They have in other ways, too: "No one under 13 is allowed to use or access the Services." That's literally a prohibition from using Reddit, even anonymously.
Furthermore,
> By accessing or using our Services, you agree to be bound by these Terms. If you do not agree to these Terms, you may not access or use our Services
That right there already says you're legally prohibited from using Reddit, even without logging in, if you don't agree to the terms. It's like how I can say "if you don't agree with the rules of my house, you aren't allowed inside."
Why do you think you have a legal right to use someone's service if you don't abide by their rules? Because they "left their front door unlocked"?
Judge: "do you agree to the terms?"
"No"
Judge: "then you can't use the API"
"But look at all the downvotes this is getting! You're wrong Mr. Judge!"
That is the purpose of public APIs. Usage without prior agreements.
If the API providers want to restrict the usage of their APIs, they are free to make them non-public.
Even if both parties agree to them, are there any legal consequences for breaking the terms of service?
Public as in being visible to all is not the same as public as in allowing use by all. You appear to be conflating the former definition with the latter. For example, my front door is visible to all, but a person isn't allowed to walk into my house without permission.
It's a totally different thing.
And if the entity operating it does not want public to use it, they need to make it non-public.
An API may be considered to be a specification or even an implementation of a specification, and you can look at a specification, implement a specification, and even look at an implementation of a specification all without using the implementation of the specification to extract data from behind the curtain.
Anyway, public things and spaces often disallow specific uses or uses by specific people. Like a park where you're not allowed to take your dog. Access is not the same as permission.
> The person is allowed to walk to your door.
Not if you notify them of a restraining order saying otherwise. We have a number of social and legal constructs facilitating the establishment of situationally-adaptive permission boundaries.
Where's the limit of that? Can I have port 443 open with a website behind it but sue anyone that accesses it because the fact that it being visible doesn't mean that I allow anyone to access it?
The very obvious answer is that penalty is commensurate with suitable advance notice of authorization limits. It's why there are rules about things like how to post "no trespassing" signs when access boundaries are not otherwise clear. But you're also allowed to notify and make someone leave your property if they wander in.
> but sue anyone
There are two very different kinds of "sue anyone". There's sue them to extract resources from them and there's sue them to make them stop. This is the latter not the former. Treating them as though they aren't wildly different is an error.
You effectively just asked whether I should be allowed to escort someone off my property without harm if they accidentally enter it. Yes, because it doesn't harm them in relation to what they didn't know in advance.
This being the whole idea behind lawfare. If you can’t afford to prove that you’re right, the guy that doesn’t notice the cost can financially drain you to get his way, since the law itself, nor the enforcement of the same, wasn’t ever really the point.
So access to X content will be restricted to X servers.
X server operators, Musk, etc, are subject to rules themselves of their home locale, and they are not a disinterested party in many discussion subjects. So one can reasonably expect that the content on X will be regulated by state parties as well as corporate interests.
Also, X has login requirements in order to view a lot of its content.
So, nitter is a backup That has no necessary obligation to corporate or locale jurisdictions, and it has no login restrictions.
Regular average everyday citizens can speak into x, and have distribution through it. But they can expect for their speech to be restricted per the above.
So speeches is freer through nitter.
TOU is contract law. It falls into the same vein as “no shirts, no shoes, no service”.
It’s contract law.
We may all hate this (I still morn Apollo) - but legally, ‘I hate it” is not law.
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 have not given legal advice to any Nitter operators, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say?
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.
[0] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2019/10/report-musks-500...
But when accessing a nitter host, you're not accessing Twitter itself, just a copy.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
you can "de facto" a lot from this arrangement :(
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's just not government censorship.
(It made everything worse if you ask me but they did do it.)
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?
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.
Do they not? And if they wanted to, couldn't they, pretty trivially, with a ToC change?
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.
Fyi this is illegal at least in the EU.
> 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...
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?
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.
what’s the mechanism they use to get this content?
I personally don't use it but frontends like these are very important in today's day and age.
As sad as it is, the majority of online discourse nowadays happens on platforms whose algorithms and interfaces are controlled by corporations.
A project like Nitter probably can't run legally, and that's okay. Custom mobile clients for Reddit still work after they banned it, life finds a way. I'm all for funding these projects though because at the end of the day, someone has to build it.
Despite the VC firm trying to assimilate the word “hacker” to humanize itself, this place is Tech-bro News and the userbase will always tend to take the side of capital.
The original founders created YCombinator, the most prestigious startup incubator, and Hacker News used to be named Startup News.
Move fast and break other people.
I've been here for well over a decade. Let me tell you, it used to be so, so much worse.
You've got legal and moral layers, then you've got to engage with the root problem that some services choose to use X as a channel to communicate with the general problem, but on top of that there's also the political intent to use Nitter explicitly to boycott Musk.
Twitter presented after me, showing all the ways they were trying and failing to stop people like me. They could not do shit. It was pretty great.
I have repeatedly ignored this class of cease and desists across my career when they have no precedent for winning in court, and nothing has ever happened. These are not police. They are employees of a private company writing you strongly worded letters to scare you because they actually have no other recourse.
If you intend on engaging in a legal battle with them I would not want to participate in that money pit, but if you simply want to keep Nitter online in a way where it is unkillable, take some lessons from thepiratebay and get some cheap disposable proxy fronting VPSs all over the world that ssh tunnel or vpn back to your actual infra so your real infras IPs are never exposed. Have lots of different people run these fronting servers in a round robin pool in many different countries and legal jurisdictions to keep their legal team busy indefinitely. Each one can also distribute the load of data collection across many IPs so you technically never communicate with twitter servers at all but just run the plumbing.
I would happily run one if for no other reason than to annoy elon musk.
In the case of PirateBay, probably the users are willing to search for "what is the latest domain", since that's how they get their "Linux ISOs" for free.
But with Nitter, the alternative is just to go to the real twitter, so many users won't bother anymore to go find the latest domain , I'd guess. And then the project dies.
If I can’t view a thread on Nitter, I just won’t read it. I’m not making an account to read someone’s “public” post
edit: .com not .org
What’s the purpose of Nitter?
Elevator pitch if you will?
And where can one read a bio of the creator(s)?
This is what happens when people say they will “donate” but will actually wait for others to do it and little to no one donates.
What you are seeing is the bystander effect. It is why projects like Nitter will end up raising capital from VCs as they actually have money.
There has to be a plausible path to making money though. If the purpose of nitter is to not make money, VCs won't fund it. If it substituted X's ads for Nitter's own ads, that could work, but the online ad market isn't as lucrative as it once was so it wouldn't be enough money.
You could find a VC whose other project has similar legal concerns and get them to fund your legal case to set precedent, but I don't know what that project would be.
To allow people to check X without feeling they are contributing to the success of the platform, by bypassing the account requirement.
I think that's the point
Because some people in positions of power ignore the consequences of using external services.
There has been a bit of a wake up call in this regard in Europe, with many governments making efforts to detach themselves from US corporations, but it's a much larger problem. When a government entity chooses to rely on Whatsapp, or Android, or some other piece of technology bound to a corporation, they are creating a bond between the rights and services they enable and interaction with that corporation.
This nuance is often ignored because "Well everybody uses (thing) anyway" and other shortsighted trains of thought. I'm by no means against opposing X in principle, but the issue at hand is not itself about X, and I suspect a lot of people wouldn't care if it was still Twitter.
Also worth noting: I click on Nitter links but I would never in my life click on an "X" link. When I use Nitter, X loses zero ad revenue.
For the decade+ there has been an unofficial town square known as twitter. As the town square has slowly become more gated and overgrown with weeds some people thought giving people a way to access the town square without paying the entrance fee would be helpful. Many found this useful.
Now I think the whole thing is trash, and agree, why use Twitter? But people like journalists and AI executives are still announcing things on Twitter because having a large following seems like a dopamine booster. In this world where people see the following as a source of legitimacy, having a single company own that town square seems...problematic.,
I don't think twitter in its current capacity should exist, the storage should be decoupled from the filters and the filters that everyone uses should be a free market with traditional competition dynamics. It may end up looking something like twitter, but without editorializing algorithms and a single walled entry. We can quibble who owns the database I suppose.
I could argue that due to the New York Times being the "newspaper of record" they should post my manifesto because, after all, it's very important. The obvious objection to this is that the NYT is privately owned, and despite having made itself very important, I don't have the right to tell them what to do.
This is the obvious objection to "Twitter is important, we should get to tell it what to do" as well, and you're old enough to know that Twitter kneecapping third-party apps is not at all new to the Musk chapter of the company, either.
Is it different, though? If so, how? Granted the jibe about the UN was sarcastic, but it's the same question, and, you know it.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
When it comes to reading, I think you could indeed make a reasonably compelling argument that the NYT must not refuse to provide a subscription to anyone who asks. That would be similar (but obviously not exactly the same) to the way common carriers are treated.
As to publishing, even then your analogy doesn't really fit because NYT has always been extremely selective about what they publish (ie they are curators) whereas twitter was fundamentally based on the polar opposite.
This combative response caught me by surprise.
I have nominal awareness of what Nitter stood for in the past.
Asking people for money given the legal precariousness AND not having a more strategic business model seems sketchy to me. Even bordering on scam.
Hence my genuine curiosity about whether there's something more substantial in the works.
Look at Twitter. If it was good under Dorsey (debatable, it did have pretty notable censorship) and Musk ruins it, why are people 'still on it'? Because Musk did a good job? Not necessarily. It takes time to build a new product, and get your friends to switch over. Switching costs. I'm on a platform because Avicebron is on it, because Alice is on it, because Bob is on it
Same goes for sites like (especially) Facebook. It's 'popular'! 3 billion active users! (They lie a lot and probably about that and they make it very easy to be 'active', by faking the notifications or giving you none at all, like increasingly with messages over the years) Well, it's hard to 'just move'. Facebook has become and has been for a while an utterly shit product that deserves the corporate death penalty. People being on it is not the slam dunk people think it is
This comes across to me as a surprising question - why do you assume there's such a bio at all, rather than it being developed by someone anonymous, as is the case for many questionably legal privacy tools?
And does the access act as a kind of fair use? Not like Nitter is making money from the access to the content
These are other people's words. Not Elon's property.
If he wants to enforce and defend his terms of service of his website and attack whoever's avoiding them to scrape it or whatever he's worried about ... he can do that.
Not being able to access it might change that.
Are you talking about WeChat, or truth social? I didn’t know nitter worked on either
If you're happy getting your information second-hand, I guess that's your choice, but not everyone is. If I read a news article that cites a tweet as a source, I'd like to see the rest of the tweet thread for context. It might not be what it seems.
Why continue to use a name, "Nitter", that looks and sounds like "Twitter"
>"or its successor"I wish the Nitter folks well, but the real solution is ending Xitter's relevance.
Xitter remains a cesspool of misinformation and disinformation.
Also in a public square you’re not supposed to masquerade as another person, which what all these services are trying to do.
Literal public squares in real life also don't have gatekeepers. They're just open spaces where anyone can naturally congregate. Emphasis on the "open".
tl;dr Elon's ground can easily be that there is an official paid service that let's you read the feeds unrestricted (this will be a good counter-challenge however IMO) while Nitter tried to run around it. So the First Amendment defense from Nitter should be shit outta luck
I’m not a lawyer but I’ve been involved with litigation between publishers and tech companies regarding scraped content.
It’s much more complicated than you’d ever think.
Personally, I think Nitter is in a strong position.
Why not invest your time on better services.