Threated with legal action if I don't remove deep links to another site

If the videos are accessible through a public non-signed URL then the owner of that website is an idiot.

Now regarding whether what you are doing is legal or not, I think it depends entirely of how you’re retrieving those URLs and if they can really be interpreted as being “public”. Are you “figuring out” the urls or are they simply there hidden in their front-end source?

In any case, he is the owner of the videos so he definitely has a legal ground to claim that what you’re doing goes against his copyrights, mostly because you’re facilitating some circumvention of whatever he has in place to keep them invisible to non-paid users.

I think what would be totally fair game is for you to put the source code in GitHub and let anyone run a version of your React App but INAL, so don’t take my word on it.

In any case, the owner should be more worried about to protecting his videos through a proper authentication system and not so much about the one guy who wrote a wrapper around his crappy website.

Just to be clear, I believe the owner is totally in his right to protect his creative work in any way he deems appropriate. I’m just baffled by the idea that his first instinct isn’t to fix the root cause of the issue.

So a company created a product (videos) and now charges access to them.

You created a website that clearly utilizes the company's name and offers their product, which you acquired in a devious manner, for free.

What is ethically unclear about this situation?

The fact that it's publicly-accessible is irrelevant. If I leave my front door unlocked, does that give you a right to rob my house?

I am not a lawyer so please consult a lawyer before taking any action. The fact of the matter is they own the copyright on their videos. And while they don't have any security persay on their videos beyond the obfuscation of the urls that does not change the fact that you do not have permission to share those links to said videos.

Those links are provided to paying customers. By sharing them to non paying customers you are effectively breaking their digital rights management of their content (as awful as it is). Thus they are fully within their right right issue you a cease and desist and follow up should you fail to obey.

Again. Not a lawyer. Consult a proper one before you take any action.

I am not a lawyer... but if I was, I would put forward a case that you created this site specifically to help people access content they had not paid for. I would give examples of many other sites that rely on URL obfuscation to protect content and show that you are circumventing the protections that have been put in place by the content owner. I would also say that because you published this site on the internet with its own similarly-spelled domain name, that you fully intended for this site to be publicly accessible and be used by many other paying and non-paying customers.

So yeah, in my opinion what you're doing is definitely immoral, but whether it's illegal or not doesn't really matter, because you just need them to have a reasonable case to force you into expensive court proceedings. If this site is just for your convenience, why publish it publicly anyway?

I am a lawyer, but I am not your lawyer -- definitely get yourself a lawyer.

You almost certainly have broken the law, as best I can tell from your responses to comments below. You may have violated the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act and other state laws. More to the point, if you're asking whether something is or isn't illegal, you should recognize that you're really asking if you'll win in court. 1) No one can answer this question for you definitively in all but the most cut and dry cases and 2) do you really want to go to court over this?

Get a lawyer. Take the links down.

IANAL, but... ethically (I am not stating a legal opinion), you're just linking to a public URL, which doesn't feel that awful to me. They should really have a login on anything they want to gate access to.

As for the legal warning, I feel like their lawyers are about as competent as their web designers in that regard.

But, that all said, is this _really_ the hill you want to die on? They can be wrong and still cost you a fortune.

Not a lawyer.

Yes, you're using the same or similar name and that may confuse users (trust me, more often than not users are [very] easily mislead [- ever heard of dark patterns?]). You can do what you're doing but you need a new and different name and the same about its content applies - the videos, images, aesthetics or whatever from the original one. That way you'll be competing against them, until then you're just outright stealing everything or impersonating from them.

Next time you want to do something like this approach the site owner and ask them if they are interested in a new visual or whatever and show them your prototype (make sure it's either private or password protected). If so you might even earn some money.

I am not a lawyer but personnly I think the fact that you are hardlinking the download links of the premiums videos is a really unethical behavior.

Lets say you were doing the same thing to any big company that host premium video content like Netflix (if they didn't had security mechanisms), you would be likely to get sued.

Why would anyone pay for their service if they can access it for free with your website?

Feels like you fired the first shot by calling your site "better-".

While it's their fault they don't put authentication on their videos, you are certainly are not entitled to share links to content that is for paid users.

You’ve done something nice with the site but in the process you affected the content owner’s income. Since you mentioned a few times that the content itself helped you and you obtained value from it, consider respecting the owner’s wish not to publish those deep links.

I would suggest a 3rd option. Offer to do some security consulting for them, they obviously need it.

I wouldn’t be worried about the copyright implications nearly so much as I’d be worried about the CFAA, state equivalents, and similar statutes, assuming you’re in the U.S.:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer_Fraud_and_Abuse_Act

Why don’t you just link to the specific episode landing page on their site, as opposed to directly to the raw video file?

Then you’re more of an “affiliate” as opposed to a thief.

“Derived” urls from publicly available JSON? BS because the only way you knew the right URLs in the first place was probably by comparing the JSON to the paths of the videos you already had access to thru your subscription. You used private information you had as a subscriber to identify their file pattern. That is not public information.

I looked at the JSON link you provided and there were no direct paths. You definitely templated those urls together with insider knowledge.

Interesting question. This is not legal advice so take what I say with a grain of salt.

I think there is an argument to be made from both sides. On one hand, they are providing public URLs and they are the ones who should implement security mechanisms in order to avoid what you are doing with their content. There is also precedent regarding web scraping (which is not exactly what you are doing, but some arguments still apply). [1]

On the other hand, just because you attribute ownership to them in regards to their content, it does not mean you are not infringing copyright.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22180559

There's a better option you could have taken and possibly still can take. Explain to them what you did, why you did it, and the value it would bring to their site. Then offer to make it available to them for a reasonable fee. That way you've solved your problem, made some money, and made things better for users. It's win-win.

If you needed privledged access to get the url's and are then using them in your own solution you've most likely violated some TOS, and they can argue you're sharing privledged information. It doesn't matter if the links are accessible without an account if you need an account to get the links in the first place.

Understand that their website, terrible as it may be, is apart of their product. Browsing on their platform is apart of their business and they can argue you're taking that away by aggregating privledged links on your own website.

Also understand it doesn't matter if you're legally right or not. They probably have more money than you, and defense of a case is a minimum 80k. You would have years of back and forth and a judge that doesn't understand tech doing summary judgement. U.S. civil system is entirely broken.

Can’t speak to the legality but your immorality is 100% crystal clear to me.

You know they charge for a product and you’re taking their product and giving to people who don’t pay.

Did you offer to help this person improve their site first?

Change it to a tinyurl and send the lawyers after them. ;)

Don't take legal advice from a website called Hacker News. Talk to a real lawyer or shut it down.

A legal threat seems unreasonable.

You have a first amendment right to type strings on your web site.

The target of the links has the right to respond to them as it wishes (e.g. looking at the referrer link and put up a 404 or whatever response they wish).

They could also list their pages in a robots.txt which you should be kind and respect.

BTW: good work! Sorry it came to this.

In your place (I would first talk to a lawyer to verify whether I can do the following):

I would comply. I would stop helping them by providing the service, as soon as humanly possible.

On its place, I'd show the scary letter, verbatim, and an explanation that, due to the scary letter, I am no longer willing to help Skill Capped by providing the service.

While at it, if at all possible, I'd suggest people just unsubscribe from Skill Capped.

I would also link some resources on the evils of recurring payments in general, for added damage.

In short, fuck them. You've wasted enough of your time and effort already. They don't deserve your help.

That is great service, thank you. Please keep deeplinking.

Quote:

Deep Linking: The most straightforward case is so-called "deep linking," which refers to placing a link on your site that leads to a particular page within another site (i.e., other than its homepage). No court has ever found that deep linking to another website constitutes copyright or trademark infringement. Therefore, you can link to other websites without serious concerns about legal liability for the link itself, with the exception of activities that might be contributory copyright infringement or trafficking in circumvention technology (discussed below).

From: https://www.dmlp.org/legal-guide/linking-copyrighted-materia...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_aspects_of_hyperlink...