GitHub To Block hundreds of Widevine forks

At the end of 2021, a collection of scripts appeared on GitHub that can be used to circumvent the copy protection measures of numerous sites, including Amazon, Netflix and Disney+. This was published by a user named “Widevinedump”. Since then, the industry has been fighting against forks.

Industry plays Whac-a-Fork

There is an arcade machine in the US called Whac-a-Mole. You have to catch emerging moles with a rubber mallet as quickly as possible, whereupon they disappear and later stick your head up again. It’s a game that can’t be won because at some point the moles pop up too quickly.

Ultimately, the film lobby organization Motion Picture Association (MPA) will probably end up in the same way. This is because it fights the forks of the code known as “Widevine Dump”, which keeps appearing on GitHub, but it is unlikely to be won in the long term. Because like the file sharing blog TorrentFreak reported, the MPA was able to quickly ban the first publication of the script collection from GitHub.

DMCA protects proprietary software

The MPA justified it as follows: “Widevine is proprietary software that prevents streams from being ripped, and the scripts circumvent this by exploiting a security flaw that allows streams to be ripped. It is not clear whether the repositories actually are disappeared due to a DMCA takedown, but that didn’t matter to the forks, because in the first few days after the leak appeared, hundreds of “forks” appeared, including some partially copied code. Another DMCA takedown followed, this one contained innumerable links.

GitHub says that the query was applied to entire fork networks, a total of 934 repositories were affected. But according to TorrentFreak, you can still find copies on the developer platform and that won’t be anytime soon.