TFW no qt dragon girl to nuzzle you and tell you how much she loves you (as a friend).
Nah, ban them paywalling mfkers. Also this is to protect the site since if MD keeps hosting paywalled chapters the site is at risk of another DMCA. Idk the specifics but my lawyer friend in civil told me that this way MD can only get hit by a C&D and not another DMCA strike since if the contents here are non paywalled that means they are non profit so at most C&D is the only threat for now. Also if were being honest, hosting aggregates are mostly an eye sore to the eyes of the official publisher but making money off ripped mangas? Do i need to remind why kissanime and kissmanga got nuked?
Your lawyer friend is partly right.
One of the defenses against DMCA is fair use parody and "transformative content" which SL is
not, but it is not a clear-cut obvious distinction. When there is no profit motive or competing product (that is, no obvious injury) it makes things even more muddy. This means most rights holders will not go through the hoops and expense needed to try to enforce their rights internationally.
The pay-walled SL groups however have a very clear and distinct profit motive, which makes it easier to convince a court that you have been injured; someone is making money off your shit and its not you. How this affects MD is that if Greedy Dildo-face Scans has a bunch of pay-wall content, and the rights owner comes after them, the rights holders have a bunch of specific files they can search for, request removal, and see what else is out there.
Hosting this files puts MD in a much more legally precarious situation for further action. That is, MD is already found to be hosting infringing content so claims that other hosted content is infringing will carry more weight.
So, MD would still be open for DMCA, but what would unlikely would be publishers having a solid internationally-bullet proof case of "These files were made by groups charging for access to them or straight rips of our official TL" and fallout from that case affecting MD.