I was threated with legal action if I don't remove deep links to another site
14 by shepherdjerred | 12 comments on Hacker News.
Hello HN, I'm looking for some advice. I'll keep it short. There's a site called Skill Capped[1]. They have videos that help you get better at the competitive video game League of Legends. You can pay monthly for access to these videos. I subscribed and quickly found their site to be unusable. They have about 1000 videos which are organized into groups called courses. Their website has no search bar, and uses a single-page design with lazy loading. In practice means that CTRL-F in-browser search doesn't work (because of lazy loading and windowing/virtual lists), so there is absolutely no way to search the site without programming knowledge. The website altogether is very hard to navigate. In response I created a thin wrapper around their site called Better Skill Capped[2]. It's a React web app with no backend. It has basic search and filter functionality. It also contains deep links to download the videos that Skill Capped offers which allows for me to watch in VLC and on my phone. It's very convenient, so I shared it with other subscribers. I don't monetize or plan to monetize the site in any capacity. The owner of the site reached out to me and claimed that I'm committing copyright infringement by allowing anyone to click these links and access their videos without paying. All I do is link to the .m3u8 files stored on their server. There's nothing more going on. As far as I know this is completely legal. While I don't wish for my site to be used to circumvent paying for their content, I also don't believe that I'm doing anything wrong here. I want to provide a better experience for those using the original site, and a download button is a part of that. So, in summary, is deep linking to a video hosted by another site at all illegal? Is anything that I'm doing here illegal/immoral? [1] https://ift.tt/2Wjchmt [2] https://ift.tt/3176suW
Monday, March 22, 2021
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