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.

> if X has a public API and Nitter is using it

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.

> 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.

> Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.

Even if both parties agree to them, are there any legal consequences for breaking the terms of service?

> Terms of service have no legal binding unless both parties agree to them.

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.

Isn't it the entire premise of Nitter and the other scrapers, to use accounts in order to access the API, access non-public posts, and proxy them to the public?

If Nitter is creating accounts for access then it doesn't matter whether they use the API or the web client (which is also API). Because creating an account binds you to the Terms of Use. It's not rocket science.

Also, to further cement this comment's unpopularity: it's unconscionable and appalling that this Nitter team, these cheats and thieves, that they are now begging for money and attorneys to bail them out of this legal grave they've dug for themselves. I sincerely hope that they are dragged in court, that they lose, and that they are severely financially damaged by trying to fight this stupid battle.

There is no reason to bypass authentication just because you hate X or Musk or you think it's somehow unjust that people can't access shit without simply signing up and agreeing to contract terms. Most sane idiots would simply shut down, take their "L" and do something productive. Doubling down and begging for legal fee donations is brazen and shameless and, honestly, insane.

"Haha I used the API which I KNOW is governed by the ToS but I didn't agree to it"

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!"

Violating a contract is illegal. It's just not necessarily a crime.

There are aspects of copyright and CFAA that could, hypothetically, be brought to bear on this as well.

IANAL, but most of the copyrights are held by the X users, X having sublicensed it. It is unlikely that X users would band together and sue Nitter, and X doesn't really have the standing for takedowns or lawsuits on those grounds.

IIUC, nitter is acting as a proxy-gateway and using authorized user accounts to do it through the API. It's essentially opening up access for unauthenticated, unauthorized persons, to content that they would not otherwise be able to access. Imagine if I established a service that granted authenticated proxy access to Bill Gates' online banking app. Or a service that proxies GitHub by means of a very prominent user account, that has commit access to significant repos in the public supply chain.

I believe that even HN commenters could see the legal flaws in such services; no matter how much they covet Bill Gates' money. nitter and friends are essentially doing the same crimes, on a read-only, low-grade low-stakes sort of way, but the victims are a very high-profile platform plus all their users. We do not appreciate these hijinks.

That determination is rooted in contract law.

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.

It was wrong then and it’s wrong now.

[dead]

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.

[dead]

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.

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.

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...

i should do this with my manning and orielly accounts

> I do think the earlier founders were more idealistic

The original founders created YCombinator, the most prestigious startup incubator, and Hacker News used to be named Startup News.

His interviews. You have to watch many of them, which is kind of hard since he's such a bad public speaker, but I still find personalities like him entertaining and he used to have moderately interesting laymen science fiction ideas before he turned to self-destructive radical Twitter psycho politics as a hobby.

I'm reminded of the phrase 天下为公, which is hard to translate exactly because 公 is doing some linguistical juggling that English has a hard time matching.

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.

the EU of course, the actually functioning UN

Can you stop with the 'just asking questions' routine?

It was only a “town square” in the minds of Twitter users, no one else thinks that about a news media propped-up social network. If anything it was a comment section attached to nothing. And comment sections all get bad after a while.

I don’t use it, but some government organizations keep doing it. Why on earth they do that, I will never know, but I’m not making an account to read a tweet.

> X needs revenue to continue

I think that's the point

You don't have a choice when cities, counties, or other government officials decide to make announcements on there.

what else is illegal? adblock?

This is just like the ad-blocker discussion and Nitter is just as fine as ad blockers. Sometimes official sources make announcements via services they should be prohibited by law from using, so you need to buy into the sour apple and read these announcements by other means, whether that means using an ad blocker or Nitter. There is no copyright infringement because X does not hold the copyright on the (vast majority) of that content.

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.

I just did.

Let’s be honest, They won’t. The users won’t fund it, as they want to use it for free.

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.

Most servers don't want automated traffic.

That's not what is happening though, people are able to access it just fine.

What the people defacto running the world's most powerful economy are saying seems quite important to get from a primary source. It's so easy to take a few screenshots of a few tweets and write many completely contradictory stories.

Many local governments and municipalities use Twitter as the sole way to make announcements.

Until Twitter sues the newspapers for rehosting their (users’) content

Is your comment important?

Yes, most people there are normal. I come to HN for interesting insight from a certain perspective... not for the average opinion of the population, which you're much more likely to find on X.