A request by a Hollywood movie studio has pulled Widevine Dump, a set of scripts that allowed movies and series to be downloaded from streaming services like Netflix, Disney+, Amazon Prime Video and more. The software was hosted on GitHub, complying with a court order from the producers based on the DMCA, a law that regulates copyright in the United States and seeks to combat piracy.
The project focused on breaking the security of Widevine, which was intended to protect content from direct streamed copies. According to the Torrent Freak website, this was not necessarily a new creation, but rather a collection of tools already circulating in private groups, intended to make such content available to the public; However, with their arrival on GitHub, they became more popular and of course attracted more attention from studios.
The request by the MPA, the Motion Picture Producers Association of America, cites infringement of Widevine's proprietary security software, in addition to the copyright of works available on streaming services, as a reason. The allegation is that the tool will be used to make content that is available on paid services available to the public, in a GitHub request that was submitted on December 31, just four days after the set was published.
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The software was removed on the same day the user account was responsible for the post. However, there is a question as to whether the withdrawal is really related to the request, since the person in charge of Widewindump had already stated that the availability of the team was temporary, with a few days to work with the interested parties.
Speaking to Torrent Freak on condition of anonymity, the person responsible for the publication said that the act is retribution for members of a closed group on Discord. At the same time, the sets were also not fully available, as the module responsible for breaking content encryption had to be purchased so that files could be effectively downloaded from the stream and shared in a common video format.
persistent hacking
As always, even after the tools were removed, other projects based on the original code continued to emerge. Between fixes or simple copies, a flurry of forks led to another request from the MPA, listing 934 software repositories and asking them to remove them all under the same charges used for the original wide-wind dump.
In this case, there was no voluntary removal, and by posting the movie studio's request, GitHub confirmed that it had complied. Projects now display a copyright takedown notice, while other options gradually appear on the platform itself, a sign that in most piracy-related cases, removal does not prevent the practice.
Fountain: fan of torrents
