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Qualcomm Takes Down 100+ GitHub Repositories With DMCA Notice

Posted by Soulskill on from the we-invented-the-for-loop dept.

An anonymous reader writes Qualcomm has forced GitHub to remove over 100 repositories due to "unauthorized publication, disclosure, and copying of highly sensitive, confidential, trade secret, and copyright-protected documents." Among the repositories taken down were for CyanogenMod and Sony Xperia. The issue though is that these "highly sensitive" and "confidential" files are Linux kernel code and reference/sample code files that can be easily found elsewhere, including the Android kernel, but GitHub has complied with Qualcomm's DMCA request.

8 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. Trolling by Kuberz · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Kind of ironic one of those repositories is owned by Qualcomm Atheros. Guess they are copyright infringing themselves?

    Oh the world we live in.

    1. Re:Trolling by adri · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's pretty funny indeed. Except when it's not.

      I'm the guy that got that through the internal Qualcomm open source review process .. and now they've done this. Grr.

  2. There need to be costs by ggraham412 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    There needs to be a cost for issuing overbroad DMCA takedown notices.

    If a court finds out later that a company had no standing or no good reason to make a DMCA claim that resulted in a takedown, there should be statutory damages. Let's start at $10000 per infraction.

  3. Qualcomm, but not really Qualcomm. by tsnow · · Score: 5, Interesting

    It isn't Qualcomm directly that issued the DMCA notices, but rather, an IP protection agency that operates on behalf of Qualcomm. In my work, I've often had to respond to these DMCA notifications, and these IP protection agencies are often pretty bush league. They'll see something that possibly infringes on an IP, and then they'll jump on it, thinking it'll make them look good to their client, who hired them. Honestly, I doubt this company will be doing much more work for Qualcomm once they discover what has happened.

  4. From the Phoronix site: by gnasher719 · · Score: 5, Interesting

    That C file is part of the Android MSM kernel source tree and does contain a "Qualcomm Confidential and Proprietary" line while noting it's now under a Linux Foundation copyright.

    Well, that could be just a tiny little problem for Qualcomm then. In a DMCA takedown notice, there are mistakes that you are allowed to make and mistakes that are criminal. A DMCA takedown notice against material that is not the one you own, or that has a license which you didn't notice, that's harmless. But you state under penalty of perjury that you are the copyright holder or represent the copyright holder of the item that you believe to be infringed. So if the Linux Foundation is indeed the copyright holder, that should be fatal.

  5. Cyveillance by janoc · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Oh that DMCA was issued by Cyveillance - the incompetent company Hollywood and music labels hired for policing P&P by string matching filenames and then carpet bombing service providers with DMCA requests, even though the content was not infringing at all. I bet they simply crawled Github for Qualcomm copyright notices, something that is often left in source code, even though it was relicensed long time ago already. Unfortunately, their bot is not that smart.

    Some references:
    https://www.techdirt.com/artic...
    http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...

    etc.

    These bozos are known and someone at Qualcomm should get fired for hiring them. This is going to backfire at Qualcomm in a spectacular way, IMO.

  6. Re:What else is safe ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    A third:

    - Join them. Since you need no legal standing to actually FILE a takedown notice on a site, start a distributed clearinghouse to file takedown notices on website holdings of all companies who are seen to file such notices. Basically, if they're identifying similar content but it is obvious that they don't own the copyright, then that indicates that THEY are likely in violation of copyright, so THEIR pages should be taken down.

    I think if someone set up a forum with automated takedown system using the original takedown notice against them (also filing the standard challenge response regarding the original notice), this kind of thing would stop pretty quickly. If every major corporation ran the risk of having its assets removed from the internet every time it issued a takedown notice, that SHOULD give them pause.

  7. Re:On this 4th of July... by Teancum · · Score: 5, Interesting

    You really have a warped sense of the law here. Note, you aren't filing a countersuit here, you are filing a counter-notice and expecting them to file a formal lawsuit against you if they want to continue. They, the guys who filed the original DMCA notice, need to spend their money filing the lawsuit and going before a federal judge to explain why they want to see you in court.

    Where do you get this notion that the law doesn't apply to you, me, or anybody else other than some special elite? Are you really serious about this belief that laws don't matter and don't actually protect anybody but somebody with seven+ figures in their bank account?