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Piracy

Plex Asks GitHub to Take Down 'Reshare' Repository Over Piracy Fears (torrentfreak.com) 60

Posted by BeauHD from the cease-and-desist dept.
Plex is a multi-functional streaming platform that allows users to watch, organize, and curate their favorite media entertainment. Sharing Plex libraries is also an option; one that comes with piracy concerns. In an effort to "avoid the growth of piracy," Plex asked GitHub to remove a repository that allows people to reshare libraries that were not originally theirs. TorrentFreak reports: The Swiss company, which is headquartered in the U.S., asked GitHub to remove a "Plex Reshare" repository, alleging that it may contribute to its piracy problem. "Plex Reshare" doesn't host any copyright-infringing material and, as far as we've seen, it doesn't reference any either. Its main purpose is to allow Plex users to make shared Plex directories browsable on the web, which allows people to "reshare" them without being the original owner. "The reason behind this project is to make available your PLEX shares to other friends unrelated to the person who owns the original library," Plex Reshare developer Peter explains.

While the repository doesn't host or link to copyright-infringing material, Plex argues that it can be used to 'grow' piracy. "We have found infringing material in your website which indeed is OTHER 'Plex Server'. The material that is claimed to be infringing is to be removed or access to which is to be disabled immediately and avoid the growth of piracy," the takedown notice reads. The first part of the sentence is somewhat confusing. Plex-reshare is not a Plex server but the company may use "OTHER Plex Server" as an internal classification category. In any case, Plex alleges that the repository can contribute to the growth of piracy on its platform.

Citing the Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act, Plex urges GitHub to take immediate action, or else it may be held liable. It's not clear what this liability claim rests on, as there are no actual copyright infringements mentioned in the takedown notice. Despite the broad nature of this claim, GitHub has indeed taken the repository offline, replacing it with a DMCA takedown reference. This likely wasn't a straightforward decision as GitHub is known to put developers first with these types of issues. In this case, it took more than three weeks before GitHub took action, which is much longer than usual. This suggests that GitHub allowed the developer to respond and may have sought legal advice from in-house lawyers, to ensure that the rights of all parties are properly considered. The report notes that the Plex-reshare code is listed on Docker Hub as well, which means it may face a similar fate.
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Plex Asks GitHub to Take Down 'Reshare' Repository Over Piracy Fears More

Plex Asks GitHub to Take Down 'Reshare' Repository Over Piracy Fears

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  • many thanks plex (Score:5, Funny)

    by bloodhawk ( 813939 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @09:35PM (#64371352)
    Thanks Plex, was not aware of this option till now, will quickly get onto it before these disappear.

    • Re:many thanks plex (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Thursday April 04, 2024 @10:00PM (#64371390) Homepage

      I'd venture a guess that Plex is being a hardass about piracy (even though that's basically Plex's raison d'etre) because being in the Apple and Roku app stores is really the only thing it has going for it. Both of those app marketplaces have rather strict developer rules about that sort of thing.

      On the other hand, any streaming device running Android can just run one of the fully open media players, such as Kodi and Jellyfin, which makes Plex kind of superfluous on that platform.

      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by pureevilmatt ( 711216 )
        Plex is better than its competition. And Plex knows how people use their service. Seems likely they're acting on legal advice to cover their asses so that they might mount a defense when the hollywood/streaming/content corporations attempt to sue them into oblivion

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by stikves ( 127823 )

          Yes,

          They have to at least give the impression of being against piracy, even though people are selling subscriptions to their terabytes of pirated content on their private servers. (I never get the idea of paying for that, but that's another story).

          The problem is, this is a thin line.

          And to make it worse, they are trying to get into the content game themselves (for a long time), they started experimenting with trailers and stuff, and I would be sad if they ever go the "Roku" way by defecating on everything o

      • Plex is a pain in the arse to use, I only use it for pirated content.

      • because being in the Apple and Roku app stores is really the only thing it has going for it.

        Apple? Roku? What are those? My Samsung TV's app store and my mobile phone would really like to know. There's actually a real reason, it's not too far from what you guessed but it has nothing to do with the stores. Plex has an actual streaming service and has partnered with actual streaming services and need to appease *studios*, not tech companies.

      • Re: (Score:2, Funny)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        I never understood why anyone was using Plex or similar apps. Even back in the 2000s there were better, open source alternatives.

        I see a lot of people still have their server transcode media as well, so obsess over transcoding performance of CPUs and GPUs. Aside from the loss of quality, it just seems so pointless when even the cheapest Android boxes can play H.265 at 4k60 these days.

        Am I missing something? Are people just locked into the ecosystem?

        • Re:many thanks plex (Score:4, Insightful)

          by wfj2fd ( 4643467 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @06:44AM (#64371890)

          Plex has it's issues, but it's still the easiest and most accessible media server out there, it has clients for Android, FireTV, AppleTV, Roku, iOS, plus a bunch of "smart" tv platforms. For the people who are sharing out their media with their friends or accessing their server remotely, it's basically plug and play, and offers internet wide access to the server without having to deal with managing dynamic dns and such.

          There are annoyances, and I'm basically done with them due to how they've been integrating their external services into things. Attempting to sneak episodes from their streaming service into your local media so they get the ad revenue. Or how they make accessing a local server still require sign-in / internet access by default.

          Jellyfin just isn't there yet for many people (but getting better every day, and is my hope for the future). Emby was getting better but started going down the Plex path and locking features.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Thanks. Personally I avoid anything like that if I can, just because of the potential lock in, or for them to make changes that annoy me like requiring an internet connection. So obviously AppleTV, iOS, FireTV and the like are of little interest to me, it's got to be Android with side-loading available.

        • I never understood why anyone was using Plex or similar apps. Even back in the 2000s there were better, open source alternatives.

          I see a lot of people still have their server transcode media as well, so obsess over transcoding performance of CPUs and GPUs. Aside from the loss of quality, it just seems so pointless when even the cheapest Android boxes can play H.265 at 4k60 these days.

          Am I missing something? Are people just locked into the ecosystem?

          Name two and explain why they're better.

          • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            Kodi for one. Open source, loads of plug-ins, and you can either manage your library as a library with automatic metadata, or just files on a network share. It's extremely flexible in terms of options and integrations.

            No need for a special server/backend, a basic network share or put the files on a USB stick will do.

            I know there are others, but Kodi is great so I haven't tried them myself.

            • I like Kodi, but it is a front end--not a server. It can't do much of what plex can--serve content to multiple diverse front ends. I want the additional features that a "special server/backend" can provide like user-specific access controls, transcoding, automatic downloads of the 'next 3 episodes' to my mobile device, etc..

              As a front end, Kodi falls in-between 'app' and -multi-source content managers like Roku; and it comes up short in the 'availability' and 'consistancy' categories: Can I buy a Kodi box l

            • Re: (Score:1)

              by Anonymous Coward
              Kodi for what it is is great, but it is pretty unreliable and buggy compared to Plex and tends to require constant maintenance.

          • Kodi user here.

            I do not use Kodi's library or metadata features; it's just not important to me.

            My collect sits on some in-house network shares (on ZFS-based storage servers) that my Kodi machines (all PC-based) access over the in-house network.

            The video collection includes a broad range of video resolutions & codecs, but best of all NO TRANSCODING REQUIRED !

            The attached display on each Kodi machine can handle up to 4k video at 60fps.

            These Kodi machines can play any codec & video resolution (up to 4k

        • Re: (Score:3)

          by hjf ( 703092 )

          Because walled gardens.

          No "Smart TV" will let you run your own open-source player on their platform, but most of them come with a Plex client.

          There's DLNA which most smart (and "not so smart") TVs support, but it's just a terrible user experience.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            That's not true, at least not in Europe. For example, Sony TVs run Android and allow side-loading your own apps. That said, Kodi is on the Play Store so you don't even need to side-load it, just install it as normal.

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by paugq ( 443696 )
              You can also side-load software on Amazon's Fire TV and not just APKs: it's rather easy to install F-Droid or Aurora Store.

        • I used to use Plex until they made an internet connection mandatory, even for your own library. As soon as you have an internet outage (local network still works), then you are forced to go back to something less sophisticated like SMB and VLC.

        • Plex is crappy, but it is significantly better than any of the open source alternatives, Over the years have used everything from Kodi and Jellyfin and many other media streaming services, most are too buggy, unrealiable or require constant technical attention to keep running which means they are not wife friendly. So as much as I dislike Plex I have the lifetime sub (purchased when it was cheap) and will continue to use it for pirate content.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

            I've been using Kodi since the original Xbox Media Centre days. I like it because it's reliable and hassle free.

            • I used to use it back in the Xbox Media Centre days. Amusingly I ditched it because it was extremely unreliable and such a hassle to keep running. constantly crashing, needing updates, playback randomly stopping mid movie etc. I would always get calls while on business trips from my wife how to fix or restart it. Then when I had a power surge that killed the Xbox media extenders and various other devices I used that as a chance to ditch that shit.

              • Re: (Score:2)

                by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

                Maybe your Xbox was broken. I really had no issues with it at all back then, it was stable and reliable. Those original machines were known to get a bit flakey.

                • Except of course when I went back to Kodi for a short stint about 6 or 7 years ago it was just as unreliable, hell maybe I am just unlucky. But it seemed every other week the plugins would stop working or playback would become unreliable (this time sound would randomly die), that is when I finally bit the bullet and jumped to Plex. Plex I don't like the interface and it doesn't have the flexibility but it just works seamlessly and has apps for all my devices so I doubt I would ever go back to Kodi now.
    • Is there a place where copies of banned github repos live on in perpetuity?
    • Streisand effect. Many of us did not know about this. Now we do, thanks to the stupid suits at Plex.

  • Broadband connections in the USA are largely asymmetrical, so it's unlikely home Plex servers could be "reshared" much before bandwidth constraints did their thing.

    • Broadband connections in the USA are largely asymmetrical, so it's unlikely home Plex servers could be "reshared" much before bandwidth constraints did their thing.

      This is finally changing, though. My Comcast cable subscription was 600 down / 24 up for a long time, then it went to 800 down / 24 up... but several months ago they bumped the upload to 100 up (but only with specific DOCSIS 3.1 modems, which was annoying since my old 3.0 modem could've handled that speed w/o issue). That's still asymmetric, but 100 up is plenty for anything I might want to do.

      • My Comcast went from 1200 / 35 to 1200 / 200 a few months ago. When my contract expired, they raised the price 40%. I have had no luck getting a reasonable new contract unlike any time in the last 10 years.
        I'm getting Sail internet next week. It will only he 200/200 to start with, but is a fraction of the Comcast price. $550 vs $1320. And their very competent tech told me it will be up to 500/500 later thus year. Spoke with him for an hour and it was a nice very technical conversation. Try that with Concas

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

      Broadband connections in the USA are largely asymmetrical, so it's unlikely home Plex servers could be "reshared" much before bandwidth constraints did their thing.

      Well, Plex also adjusts the bitrate as needed so it can accomodate the users available bandwidth. If a server gets hammered the quality goes down so it can still serve the content to people.

  • Plex is a great product, but for all the wrong reasons, like it's just a media player, an awesome concept and I wish I had adopted it earlier before it started changing its course and before other streaming services became awful. - I went back to DVDs and it's a convenient way to access that content, it will be possible using the re-share feature to re-share funny videos that in the past would be shared through email, kind of like the early days of YouTube, that's assuming the user has full copyright owners

    • that's what's so weird about this they're going after them because it could potentially be used for piracy, and that's something I've never considered, but it's actually a good way to save money, to be honest.

      They didn’t consider it either, there are any number of sites to get pirated content. However, plex is a legal way to save money and share with family and friends both of which corporations are trying to get rid of.

      • However, plex is a legal way to save money and share with family and friends both of which corporations are trying to get rid of.

        That's pretty much the vibe I’m getting.

        “Want to pay money to conveniently rewatch 30-year-old movie?”

        “No, I have 30-year-old movie on VHS...”

    • like it's just a media player

      I assume the last time you used Plex was in the early 2000s? You may have since missed that it is complete streaming service, able to not only source data from a server on your local network, but also from their own official stream, while also combining all your other streaming subscriptions into a single searchable media database.

      Calling it "just a media player" is like saying a computer's OS is just a graphics card driver. If you were after "just a media player" you sure as hell wouldn't be picking Plex.

      • I have an instance of it running on a NAS, I mostly put my DVD's\blu-rays on there and yes it does pull metadata from somewhere and gives it a nice thumbnail, it does have those features that let you stream subscription content, but I don't use those features. - I have family and friends who are mostly anti-subscription, so there is a bit of tweaking I have to do on the back end to hide those features from annoying them.

        For reference my car has this fancy radio that does all this app stuff, but I only ev

  • Glad I found out about this. But my biggest issue, is that ppl that have the download option on, when they download it doesn't show up in stats. I've also found that the downloaded version is exactually the same as the copy that sits on my server. so if they view one of ripped blueray, it transcodes it to 1080p@ max 8mbit using maybe 2 or 3 gb of outbound. If they download it, they get the whole 30-60gb file, consuming quite a bit of outbound bandwidth.

    Something Plex should think about...

  • In my country its my legal right to be able to share content i have with my friends, known as "koti kopiointi oikeus". Government here pays for copyright organisations compensation about this from taxes. Funny how companies are hell bend to limit consumers legal rights.
    • I don't know about your personal rights in Finland, but I know the EUCD and DSM Directive are even more strict than the DMCA, and include all the nasty bits like anti-circumvention. Take-down notices are enshrined in law in every EU state as far as I know.

      • If I remember rightly, when DVDs were a thing, the Australian government allowed region unlocking of DVD players, mainly because content holders weren’t making their content available in the country. Maybe there is a similar attitude in Finland, for equivalent reasons?

        • Entirely possible- not speaking Finnish, i had difficulty answering that question myself.
          I do know that what they describe is not the norm for the EU. The norm for the EU is an even stricter set of EU directives than the DMCA.

  • considering the dumb DMCA doesn't apply in the EU... I cloned a copy for myself and encourage my brethren humans to do the same.
    let the powers that be at plex know that the streisand effect is alive and kicking

  • False claim (Score:3)

    by lapm ( 750202 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @04:46AM (#64371780)
    Any technology can be used to grow piracy so do we shutdown github? WWW? ftp? googledrive? Hei lets disable computers, scanners, printers while were at it. This company really has no claim to make DMCA take down, they dont even own this piece of code. And since this sharing can be used also perfectly legal distribution of material thats is legally free to distribute. This claim of theirs is pit lets only pick fact favorable to us.

  • ...as it would not exist if not for that which it denies.

    UPDATE: GitHUb complied... "Repository unavailable due to DMCA takedown."

  • Well then we're moments from Plex being taken down on the same premise.

    What a bunch of schmucks.

  • Now that there is awareness that such technology exists, how long before we see clones or even forks elsewhere? There is likely going to be a Streisand effect?

  • Better shut that down too huh?

  • An analogy (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Do you ask Lowes to stop selling hammers because burglars use them to break into homes? No.

  • Fuck Plex (Score:3)

    by OfMiceAndMenus ( 4553885 ) on Friday April 05, 2024 @11:31AM (#64372446)
    They don't own the code they're asking to take down, and it doesn't make use of any of their code. Get bent.

    Github and other platforms need to stomp out these shitty pearl-clutching copyright sycophants as hard as possible. Fuck off, Plex. Your shitty proprietary software has already been bested by open alternatives. You have no standing to remove this, and the law you quote doesn't apply here.

    • I don't disagree with most of what you say here. What I find interesting is that github took it down, where they are known to be pretty lenient with what they keep up, or revert takedowns pretty liberally.

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