I am the developer of a project with a small community known as Offflix. Now I recently discovered that Yts has an api, and it is too irresistible for me to integrate it into my project as a simple in app click to download any movie.
So, would doing that and making the code open source be illegal? I am not a US citizen and I am not technically ripping movies, I am just packaging yts's functionality inside my app. Would github flag and destroy me repo if I do this?
Probably a bad idea. If you really wanted to do it, you should add plug-in support to your main project, then create a separate repo, maybe under a different account, with the potentially illegal yts download plug-in. That way only the plug-in repo would get DMCAed and could be mirrored by other people, or hosted off GitHub.
But even if I developed a plug in, for the plug in to work, I would have to bundle a torrent engine and anything that allows movies/series to be downloaded might get flagged I guess
The reason they were banned on leetx is because they sold out their user email lists to an anti-piracy law firm which tried to extort money from people. I wouldn’t trust people like that. I especially would be wary of subjecting users to people like that. Torrent freak has coverage if you care to search.
make this functionality into a plugin that you publish under a different account, that way you can have this functionality while maintaining plausible deniability