Ace Stream — GPL violators

[ValdikSS]

Hello!
Here is a project called Ace Stream. They use modified VLC as their player and refuse to provide source code for it. There is a .patch for VLC 1.1.12 on their forums which was uploaded more then a year ago, but they refuse to publish new changes for current Ace Player, which is based on 2.0.5.
When I was asking for the source, Ace Stream administrator called me their license violator and I got banned from Ace Stream system without any explanation.
And there is a mistake in their license agreement. It says that Ace Player HD is provided under the LGPLv2 license, but VLC is GPLv2 and can't be sub-licensed.
I wrote about that some time ago on videolan@videolan email, but never got a reply.

[TheBigTime001]

Also, if their project is validly licenced under either the GPL or any of its variants, they are REQUIRED to provide source code when asked, so even if they could validly make this redistribution (which, as you have pointed out, they cannot), since they have refused to provide source code upon request, they have made an even more massive violation of the GPL they claim to be licenced under and therefore are completely illegal in the distribution of software. They are legally obligated to follow the GPL's terms or face the consequences. Unfortunately, VideoLAN only has the financial room to develop VLC and run the websites, so a legal team is out of the question. But please make some noise on the Internet if you want to, and bring people's attention to the illegality of this product. Those of us who are on the forum have sadly seen only a few victories, but yours could be the next. Perhaps someone could send this company a cease-and-desist email and chew them out. Thank you for bringing this to everyone's attention! PS: you cannot legally be banned for asking for the source of a copyleft work, so there's a third offence right there.

[EdwinE]

they even ripped off our beloved cone . That means war France vs Russia & see who wins the battles..



mental note to self: re-read topic at work & have fun with Ace Stream

[Jean-Baptiste Kempf]

It's hard to get their source.

[mancerrss]

Take them down. Also their player are even used for piracy anyways, take them down before the blame gets passed into us by DMCA or some copyrights groups there

[Rémi Denis-Courmont]

Ace Stream is not operating from the US; I don't think DMCA applies. (I however do reserve any and all legal avenues against VLC license violators.)

[InTheWings]

There's some source on the ubuntu releases. Unsure if that's old.
https://bitbucket.org/AceStream/acestreamplayer

[duckofdeath]

I unfortunately doubt they'd care what VideoLAN says about GPL. I'm pretty sure Ace Stream is amongst other things a malware installer for their preferred nastiness of the moment, like blockchain miners, backdoors and whatnot. I think it's Russia based so, not very likely they'd care what people say about it.

[ale5000]

Look here: https://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.en.html

Once you have collected the details, you should send a precise report to the copyright holder of the packages that are being misused.
The copyright holder is the one who is legally authorized to take action to enforce the license.
...
Note that the GPL, and other copyleft licenses, are copyright licenses. This means that only the copyright holders are empowered to act against violations.
The FSF acts on all GPL violations reported on FSF copyrighted code, and we offer assistance to any other copyright holder who wishes to do the same.

[Ludrax]

I think this requires closer look:

The rule of thumb is that if you can watch TV channels using VLC then you can also use it with TVMosaic (there are some corner cases, but in general it works).