Porn Companies Are Going After GitHub

rossgneumann writes Porn production companies are currently engaged in a scorched earth copyright infringement campaign against torrenting sites with URLs containing specific keywords and Github is getting caught in the crossfire. Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by companies representing various porn companies in the last month alone have resulted in dozens of legitimate Github URLs being removed from the search engine's results, TorrentFreak first reported."

Comments

Re:Cloud...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you need Google to index your data in the cloud because you're too fucking lazy to bookmark it, you deserve to lose track of it, you stupid moronic sack of shit.

not barred by DMCA, but tortuous interference

[raymorris]

The "penalty of perjury" clause of the DMCA applies to identifying yourself, but the DMCA isn't the only law. Recklessly causing harm was a tort before the DMCA, and it still is. I believe there has been at least one law suit for tortuous interference and I'd like to see more. I think the plaintiffs could prevail where the notices were sent out recklessly.

In some cases, the person CONTINUED to send notices after being notified that many of them were clearly invalid. One can argue that they TRIED to come up with a good list of URLs, but once they've been informed that their list is crap, it's reckless to continue sending them.

Of course it's possible that they could show that they sent out 10,000 notices and 9,990 of those were perfectly correct. With a 99.9% accuracy rate the claim that they were reckless would be tougher to argue.

Re:any repercussions?

[The Snowman]

The Github projects being taken down contain source code that is definitely somebody's intellectual property in each case. And by filing fraudulent DMCA takedown requests, these porn sites are misrepresenting themselves as the owners of that intellectual property.

I know this is Slashdot, and asking someone to read the article is a bit much, but nobody is removing projects or any IP from Github. They are demanding that Google remove the links from their search results. From the article, emphasis added:

Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by companies representing various porn companies in the last month alone have resulted in dozens of legitimate GitHub URLs being removed from the search engine's results, TorrentFreak first reported.

The exact same text appears in the summary at the top of this page. You do not even have to read the article, just the summary!