alt Hacker NewsFFmpeg has issued a DMCA takedown on GitHub
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Here is the github thread which had some recent discussion before the repo was taken down. Rockchip said something like it would be too much work to fix the licenses for all the new chips they are creating.
https://web.archive.org/web/20251103193914/https://github.co...
I wonder how this will work with AI stuff generating code without any source or attribution. It’s not like the LLMs make this stuff up out of thin air it comes from source material.
Takedown letter: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2025/12/2025-12-1...
LGPL allows compiling the whole of ffmpeg into a so or lib and then dynamically linking from there for your closed source code. That's the main difference between LGPL and GPL.
But if you change or add something in building ffmpeg.so that should be GPLed.
Apparently they copied some files from ffmpeg mixed with their propitiatory code and compiled it as a whole. That's the problem here.
Not familiar with Rockchip. Plenty of searches come up with cases of people incorporating ffmpeg into Rockchip projects. I still see the license files and headers. What is different with this DMCA takedown?
Would be nice to live in a world where the stupidity of "intellectual property" and "copyright" had already been laughed out of the room. But alas we live in this one, the moral and legal equivalent of walking through a park covered in trash.
The law doesn't seem to work anymore. There are so many cases where someone can do illegal stuff in plain sight and nothing can be done about it. Not everyone has tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars to spare to get a lawyer. By the time you manage to save up the money, you realize that this system is absolutely crooked and that you don't trust it to obtain justice anyway even with the lawyers and even if you are legally in the right.
The law exists mostly to oppress. It's exactly the argument that gun proponents make "Only the good guys obey gun laws, so only the bad guys have guns."
All the good guys are losing following the law, all the bad guys are winning by violating the law. Frankly, at this stage, they write the laws.
Clash of cultures. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanzhai#Regulation vs. the 鬼子 鬼佬 老外
Time to create a decentralized, blockchain-based GitHub (GitCoin?) and have every commit be a transaction on the chain. Nothing would ever be takedownable.
FOSS is and always was a scam, in order to feed tons of code to LLMs and kicking coders in the balls, so they could not monetize their work. And, noone cares about the licenses, everyone steals and robs whatever is at arms length.
Chinese is steal of coding, which can pop device company use ffmpeg, 有利有弊
The repo in question incorporated FFmpeg code while claiming their code is Apache 2.0-licensed over 1.5 years ago[1]
This is not allowed under the LGPL, which mandates dynamic linking against the library. They copy-pasted FFmpeg code into their repo instead.
[1] https://x.com/HermanChen1982/status/1761230920563233137