Or they just panicked with the RIAA request and needed time to regroup. Cynicism doesn't have to be a hobby.

Being a rube isn't a great hobby either, that's why "fool me once ..." is a famous saying. As are the various versions of "who benefits?".

Pretty decent rules of thumb.

And at a higher level ... who cares if they did it maliciously or because they "panicked", you can't ever know that anyway and either one means you can predict what they will do in similar situations.

This isn't the first frivolous DMCA request GitHub complied with. A company owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world doesn't need to "panic" about something like this.

Sounds like cynicism is your hobby, buddy.

That's not what cynicism means.

Even if largely PR, that's still a million dollars.

After Nat's cynically duplicitous comments and actions, it's hard to view this as anything other than PR. A $1 million expense is not a big advertising expense for github. It was a $7.5 billion sale. Microsoft spend 0.013% of that on this PR piece.

I can't imagine the fallout from this didn't wipe several times that off of github's valuation.

If github had done this before the EFF letter, it would have been something else. With the EFF letter, they have zero liability to reinstating the repo, and are borderline legally required to do so.

We should still incentivize correcting wrongs over letting them stand.