[oefrha]

> China has extremely strict anti-scraping laws

It might be the case, but the repo you linked doesn't support that claim very well, and the cases cited are largely irrelevant to the case at hand.

"Forbidden area #1: providing scraping-related services to criminal organizations". Three cases listed. The first is one programmer's personal account of being arrested, which is very scant on why; the only info I can glean: "I developed some sort of ML API which is then used by a criminal enterprise against some influential company for god knows what purpose". Hard to draw any conclusion from that. The second case is ML-based CAPTCHA bypass for credential stuffing against Tencent QQ, emphasis on credential stuffing. The third case is some sort of black hat SEO campaign against Baidu, the scraping part (if any?) doesn't seem central to the conviction.

"Forbidden area #2: scraping and sale of personal info". Common sense, irrelevant.

"Forbidden area #3: commercial use of unlicensed business data" and the following untitled category list three cases, all of which are mass scraping operations either from a business competitor or that seriously affects site operations (through aggressive scraping).

AFAIK there are a lot of low hanging fruits in the Chinese piracy scene not yet targeted, and there are enough small-time commercial operations involving copyrighted media products begging to be taken down, it's highly unlikely anyone will bother to target some high-barrier-of-entry tool mostly facilitating the download of otherwise public videos.

[yorwba]

#1 is relevant, because the developers of scraping services themselves were held liable for the use of their tools for illegal purposes. As you say, there are many small-time copyright infringers (a.k.a. criminal organizations), some of which probably use youtube-dl to circumvent anti-scraping measures (analogous to the CAPTCHA bypass case).

> it's highly unlikely anyone will bother to target some high-barrier-of-entry tool mostly facilitating the download of otherwise public videos

It's true that any particular violation is unlikely to be prosecuted because there are so many, but youtube-dl is already being targeted, so if it stays up on Gitee (or Gitlab, for that matter), then only because RIAA doesn't file a complaint.

[oefrha]

I’d say a publicly disseminated free tool is pretty different from for-profit services with contracts. Other than the very vague case from which we can conclude nothing, all other cases are clearly for-profit, and the QQ credential stuffing case specifically established that the for-profit service provider was aware/suspicious of the criminal abuse as part of the conviction.

> only because RIAA doesn't file a complaint

Pretty sure RIAA/MPAA aren’t targeting China (yet), it’s still a bittorrenting Wild West according to my Chinese sources. They’ll need lawyers specialized in Chinese law and be prepared to navigate a foreign legal system if they want to look that way, frivolous DMCA takedowns that they file hundreds a day won’t do.

The power of a legal threat lies in the fact that there could be follow-up legal action; it’s toothless if no legal action could follow.

[yorwba]

> Pretty sure RIAA/MPAA aren’t targeting China (yet), it’s still a bittorrenting Wild West according to my Chinese sources. They’ll need lawyers specialized in Chinese law and be prepared to navigate a foreign legal system if they want to look that way, frivolous DMCA takedowns that they file hundreds a day won’t do.

Pretty sure they already have Chinese lawyers. While suing every single BitTorrent user would be an exercise in futility, the effort is much more justified when limited to the handful of big video platforms, where the licensing fees are enough to offset the legal costs of enforcing compliance. Those platforms are using their licensed content to convert free users into paid (e.g. first few episodes are free to get you hooked, the rest requires a VIP account), so they also have an incentive to prevent pirates from undercutting them with a free copy on their own platform.

I think torrents will get less and less popular in China due to an increasingly mobile-first user base and rising incomes making paid content more convenient that piracy. I know someone active in the subbing scene, and they recently had to handle an entire subtitling project on their own because the other members quit the group. (I don't know why they quit, though. Maybe they just grew out of the hobby.)