What was submitted was not a DMCA notice, Microsoft was not legally obligated to comply with it.

From what I know, DMCA notice requires the identification of claimed copyrighted content and this document does no such thing.

RIAA taking down all of GitHub would instantly pit them against all of Microsoft, and make every developer who already hates their guts to pick up the pitchforks and march. They won't try doing it.

And as much as RIAA is mostly a slimey pit of lawyers, they would stand no chance again msft's goblin hoard of attorneys.

More attorneys does not convince judges more. The RIAA has some merit, therefore they can preliminary injunction github to remove the repo. If github doesn't comply then they receive sanctions. That's simply how it works.

The other commenters here have argued pretty convincingly that the RIAA has no merit at all. Microsoft should have done the same reading of the letter and determined that this is a hill they have to fight on, in order to operate Github effectively.

> RIAA taking down all of GitHub would instantly pit them against all of Microsoft

microsoft isn't gonna fight the good fight. There's no reward (to them) for doing so, and there's only a cost. It'd be a stupid business decision.

What is more correct is to lobby legislation changes to copyright. Repeal the DMCA, or change copyright law to such that you cannot abuse it this way. And this lobbying is the civil responsibility of everyone, not just microsoft.

No company would fight the good fight for the same reasons. This can only be fixed by changing the law. Not to mention find and persecute the parties who were paid directly or indirectly to pass this legislation. RIAA lobbyists (and all other corporate lobbyists) don't lobby in the sense of arguing for something. They use stick and carrot techniques against legsitlators. It's practically raketeering.

I doubt they'd fear the PR backlash. They didn't fear it before SOPA, and even when SOPA was defeated, it was largely because the backlash was driven by efforts by sites like Wikipedia, Facebook, and Google advertising counter-SOPA messaging, and that drives far more traffic than sites like GitHub.

Taking down GitHub would instantly make millions of developers at thousands of companies unable to do their work.

Interestingly, my country (Turkey) did ban github (along with google drive, microsoft onedrive etc.) back in 2016. However they reopened it within hours (18 hours to be exact), because systems all over the country were failing. One of the driving reasons was that ATMs stopped working. Appearently they were downloading some updates from github to function.

Stupidity has no limits.

For more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_of_GitHub

And GitLab has now banned Iranians:

https://ahmadhaghighi.com/blog/2020/gitlab/

I am well aware of that. But RIAA likely doesn't care one iota about that damage. The injunction they'd write would be along the lines of:

"It's necessary that the entirety of GitHub be shut down until this case is decided. As noted here, they have persistently failed to adhere to our DMCA take-down notices, and continue to knowingly host content that circumvents our copyright protection schemes. Furthermore, it is not sufficient to just remove this content, because it has been and will be repeatedly readded, and GitHub has taken no action to remove these extra copies. We are likely to succeed on our merits because <blah>. We are irreparably harmed because <blah>."

That doesn't mean they'd necessarily win on a broad injunction, but they can still push for one (see Apple v Epic for a recent example). And stunts like this one make it more likely that a judge might agree that a broad injunction is necessary instead of a narrow one.

If we cannot shut down criminal banks because they are too big to fail. Then we certainly cannot shut down Github.

Only for a few days, critically.

GitHub may be the single source of truth, but it’s not the only copy of the data.

It will take far more than "a few days" to change GitHub-based workflows. Data loss is not the only way to lose productivity.

Any diligent company that relies on GitHub so heavily will have a service-level agreement in their contract, which will include compensation for a major outage.

Otherwise they're getting GitHub's best effort, which is exactly what they've paid for.

More importantly GitHub could lose the status of safe haven and could be held liable for all repositories.