I am the developer of a project with a small community known as Offflix. Now I recently discovered that Yts has an api, and it is too irresistible for me to integrate it into my project as a simple in app click to download any movie.
So, would doing that and making the code open source be illegal? I am not a US citizen and I am not technically ripping movies, I am just packaging yts’s functionality inside my app. Would github flag and destroy me repo if I do this?
Probably a bad idea. If you really wanted to do it, you should add plug-in support to your main project, then create a separate repo, maybe under a different account, with the potentially illegal yts download plug-in. That way only the plug-in repo would get DMCAed and could be mirrored by other people, or hosted off GitHub.
I think the way lots of projects handle something like that is to add a plugin system to the main project, and then offer it as a plugin in a different repo.