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DMCA Notices Remove 8,268 Projects On Github In 2015 (torrentfreak.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Github's transparency report for 2015 shows that the site received many DMCA notices that removed more than 8,200 projects. "In 2015, we received significantly more takedown notices, and took down significantly more content, than we did in 2014," Github reports. For comparison, the company received only 258 DMCA notices in 2014, 17 of which responded with a counter-notice or retraction. In 2015, they received 505 takedown notices, 62 of which were the subject of counters or withdrawals. TorrentFreak reports: "Copyright holders are not limited to reporting one URL or location per DMCA notice. In fact, each notice filed can target tens, hundreds, or even thousands of allegedly infringing locations." September was a particularly active month as it took down nearly 5,834 projects. "Usually, the DMCA reports we receive are from people or organizations reporting a single potentially infringing repository. However, every now and then we receive a single notice asking us to take down many repositories," Github explains. They are called 'Mass Removals' when more than 100 repositories are asked to be removed. "In all, fewer than twenty individual notice senders requested removal of over 90% of the content GitHub took down in 2015."
The DMCA is like the TSA:
In the words of the head of El Al, "The TSA isn't security. It's an annoyance."
The DMCA doesn't stop pirates, it just interferes with legit and acceptable things.
On github, what constitutes being a valid target for a DMCA takedown?
Don't host anything in the US. Ever.
Host your projects in more liberal countries like Russia or China.
Each and every crooked piece of bought-off shit that voted to pass this abomination need to be drawn, quartered, and put on display.
I had a 16x16 icon of a question mark that a popular project was using that had forked several thousandth times... I made my request and they were all taken down. Justice served!
The DMCA has been such a blessing to our family (my wife is also a lawyer).
GitHub actually them available online: https://github.com/github/dmca
Some of them are like someone using one of Adobe's .svg graphics or a commercial script file or source code file being distributed.
And some of them are abuse. Like this: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2016-01-15-AlgoTrader.md and they did license their source code under the GPL as shown here at the bottom https://web.archive.org/web/20140208002555/http://code.google.com/p/algo-trader/
So it looks like most DMCA takedown requests are legitimate, but presumably a small percent are abuse.
I was one of those counter notices. An ex business partner tried to claim ownership of my work, after I pulled my code from the project. Github disabled and then re-enabled my repository, within 1 week of sending in a counter notice. The person claiming infringement profited from my work without giving me a cent. He failed to file against me in court, as he was as broke as I am and had no merit to his claims.
These transparency reports are quite informative. But I'd love to see the actual removals. At some pont, we need to see if the removals have any validity or not. We just can't tell from this data. Is there any legal reason they can't be publicly posted? Actually, I wonder if the DMCA should *require* that they be public, so that the public at-large knows who the bullies are, or maybe who the jerks who keep copying people's stuff are. If you don't want your notice public, don't file it.
I wonder how many of those takedowns were done under false claim. Meaning its fraudlent DMCA takedown request... In youtube they match all sort of shit for DMCA takedown making sometimes just unbelievable claims. What chances does small person or developer to really challenge those false claims. Example in my country its perfectly legal to reverse engineer software and make compatible software. Our law also docent know shit like DMCA and hopefully newer will.
I have a theory that the DMCA and other similar legislation were written by Reptilians decades in advance, placed in a drawer, and pulled out years later. They planned many (but not all) of the paths taken and knew what was to come.
That is the US. Overseas, they are hard at work on other matters. Take, for instance, that shockwaves are reverberating around the Kremlin today as word spreads regarding an extraordinary meeting called by Vladimir Putin yesterday where, according to sources, the Russian president said that “95% of the world’s ruling class are not even human,” but are “cold-blooded hybrids” who are “members of an ancient cult.”
Did Putin just out the world’s political and financial elite as cold-blooded hybrid human reptilians? Did he really just go there?
Speaking at a behind closed doors forum for the highest echelons of government and staff in his home city of St. Petersburg, Putin responded to questions about the Panama Papers leak by pointing out who was behind the plot: the U.S. government, their spy agencies, and George Soros’s OCCRP.
Putin slammed his fist on the table and exclaimed, “George Soros, you sly dragon, this is war,” according to sources close to the President. Putin then vowed to ramp up sanctions against Soros’s Open Society even further.
When questioned by a top aide as to what he meant by “dragon” (an unusual word in Russian), Putin sighed heavily and fixed the assembled group with his trademark stare before explaining that all is not what it seems in regards to how the world is run.
Resisting gentle attempts by close aides to stop the President ‘going there,’ Putin said that the evidence was everywhere, and that he personally had intimate knowledge of their dealings. He said that he was not one of them, but they are afraid of him and have attempted to lure him into their “ancient Babylonian cult.”
“The evidence, ancient and modern, is enormous,” he said.
Putin said that mankind has been manipulated to become “unconscious” through the use of programming by media and politics, the perfect example of which was the recent Panama Papers leak. The world’s ruling class have tyrannical control over our food, water, and air supply, and they are actively dumbing down the masses.
What's up with the AlgoTrader ass-hat? He created an open source project (he admits it was an open source project), discontinued it, and now is filing DMCA claims against people who kept a copy and forked it? Does this moron not understand what "open source" means? He should be countersued into the ground.
Actually probably just a bunch of petty Adobe lawyers getting entire useful projects taken down because the noobs writing the software didn't realize all those nice pretty fancy fonts shipped with Photoshop and Illustrator are not free for re-use.
Why only list DMCAs? Because they're a special subset of cases that sometimes makes Github look like the good guy? How about listing the repos they forced offline themselves for petty ideological reasons?
The 2014 report failed to list the takedown of the Gamergate hub, and this 2015 report doesn't mention how Github took down WebMConverter to strongarm the developer into changing its content.
Instead of using a broad, feel-good word like "transparency," they should just call it the DMCA report since that's the one specific kind of censorship it discloses.
Seems you are correct. https://github.com/curtiszimmerman/AlgoTrader
that would contain only the projects censured by DMCA.
DMCA Notices Remove 8,268 Projects On Github In 2015
I think the real news is that they have a time machine.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
GitHub has stopped listing new ones:
That's a lot of DMCA notices, more than I would expect. But perhaps this explains why:
"In all, fewer than twenty individual notice senders requested removal of over 90% of the content GitHub took down in 2015."
Seems my prediction didn't count on those ten people who sent most of them. The "90% by 10 people" figure is similar to patent law suits. About four or five "companies" file over half the patent law suits in the US.
I wonder, though. Other commenters who looked at the DMCA notices say most of them seem legit. I wonder if the large numbers of notices filed by those ten people were legit, or if they are DMCA trolls.