On March 23, 2026, FAKKU — an English-language hentai manga publisher — filed a DMCA takedown notice with GitHub targeting 28 repositories. The notice claimed the tools constituted circumvention of technological protection measures under Section 1201 of the DMCA, arguing they enabled automated mass downloading from sites that host content FAKKU has licensed exclusively.
The repositories targeted included gallery-dl, and Hitomi Downloader (KurtBestor/Hitomi-Downloader). GitHub complied with the notice and disabled public access to the repositories. The DMCA notice was published in GitHub's public DMCA repository at github/dmca.
What FAKKU actually argued
FAKKU's notice specifically called out extractors for sites including NHentai, ExHentai, Hitomi.la, Hentai Foundry, and Pururin. The argument was that tools like gallery-dl and Hitomi Downloader were primarily designed to circumvent technological protection measures controlling access to FAKKU's licensed works.
GitHub noted it did not find sufficient information to determine a valid anti-circumvention claim under Section 1201, but determined the notice contained other valid copyright claims and complied with the takedown regardless.
The GitHub developer community pushed back hard. Legal observers pointed out that FAKKU's secondary liability argument was, in the words of one legal commenter, "weak but not legally baseless." Others noted that several of the targeted sites already comply with DMCA requests themselves, and that Hentai Foundry is primarily a platform for original artist content rather than piracy.
Hitomi Downloader was collateral damage
Hitomi Downloader's connection to hentai content is in the name — it was originally built to download from Hitomi.la, a hentai content aggregator. Over time the software expanded to support hundreds of other platforms including Chzzk, SOOP, YouTube, Twitter, and many others. Its Chzzk and SOOP support had nothing to do with FAKKU or the hentai sites named in the takedown.
That didn't matter. GitHub's DMCA compliance process is not surgical. The repository was disabled in full, taking Chzzk support, SOOP support, and everything else down with it.
Where Hitomi Downloader went
Following the GitHub takedown, Hitomi Downloader migrated to Codeberg, an open-source alternative to GitHub. The developer confirmed the app continues to function when downloaded from Codeberg. Users who already have the software installed and connect to the Codeberg-hosted filter lists report it works normally.
However, Hitomi Downloader's Chzzk support had been broken independently of the DMCA situation. GitHub issues going back to early 2025 document repeated failures — 400 errors on Naver's VOD playback API, authentication session failures, adult content verification blocks that were never properly resolved. The DMCA takedown made the situation more visible, but the Chzzk plugin was already unreliable before March 2026.
What this means for the broader download tool ecosystem
The FAKKU action is being watched closely by the developer community. Gallery-dl's maintainer began migrating development to Codeberg in direct response, and community members immediately began building external extractor modules to restore functionality outside of GitHub's reach.
The incident echoes the 2020 RIAA vs youtube-dl situation, where GitHub took down the repository before ultimately restoring it after the Electronic Frontier Foundation challenged the takedown. In that case GitHub also created a $1 million legal defense fund for open source developers facing DMCA claims. Whether a similar response happens here remains to be seen — GitHub's stance on developer rights appears to have shifted since 2020.
For Korean streaming users specifically
If you used Hitomi Downloader for Chzzk or SOOP content, the path forward is either the Codeberg version (with unreliable Chzzk support) or a tool built specifically for Korean streaming platforms. Vodloader covers Chzzk, SOOP, and Pandalive directly — not as one plugin among hundreds, but as the core focus of the product. It handles the authentication and VOD type detection issues that consistently broke Hitomi's Chzzk plugin, and adds cloud download for VODs that aren't directly accessible as files.