I don't really see how GitHub receiving a staggering 1 DMCA notice a month from Sony is newsworthy ... the interesting number isn't that 50% (aka "6") notices were sent this year by Sony, it's that GitHub's only gotten 12 all year.

Other than not deliberately cultivate an environment for illegal file sharing, what has GitHub done to insulate themselves from the piracy & file sharing community so effectively? It seems like it'd be a great place to dump illegal music/videos/app/game/etc downloads, and accounts are easy to make.

There are dozens of download sites like rapidshare that allow you to do what you describe without the overhead of git and the files are far more hidden than they are on github.

More hassle than it's worth for public repos as compared to simply uploading to a random site or torrenting. As for private ones, no DMCA requests since they don't know about them.

yeah, 12 is not that statistically significant. If they had >30, than maybe.

O how I love the central limit theorem

The larger question I'm curious about is how many of these are legitimate DMCA violations vs. the attack on fair-use that HNers have come to expect when this 4-letter word is invoked.

Does anyone know what the tool was?[0] jimmikaelkael is a well known PS2 dev. I had checked out the DMCAed repo when he first put it up about a week ago but I can't recall it was.

[0]: https://github.com/jimmikaelkael/ps3mca-tool.git

It's a driver to provide filesystem access to PS2 memory cards, using the USB Memory Card Adaptor designed for the PS3.

There's another tool using this to make bootable memory cards for bypassing region checks.

The amount Sony spends on Lawyers it could have spent on real security(so many server/network issues in last 2 months) and some path breaking products.

All my Sony money now goes to Apple.

if you want to read it in more elegant format, there you go: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2011-06-21-sony.m...

The title doesn't quite make sense? "Sony officially 50%..."?

"Sony [is now] officially 50% …" – The "is now" is implied.

Sony officially the whole fleshlight?!

Sony are dicks, this is news?

For attempting to protect their IP by following the processes established in current law?

Correct.

What, did you think that just because they are using the legal system that they are somehow immune to being dicks?

I suppose that you would have stood up for slave owners back when that was legal? IP is an oxymoron and the law is wrong.

We aren't talking about enslaved humans. We are talking about a company defending its inventions, its business. I don't see where Sony are being "dicks".

No, we are talking about consumer rights, and the property rights of the legal owners of Sony manufactured devices. It may not be autonomy rights, but it is an issue of rights nevertheless.