The law also permits content to be restored immediately upon receipt of a counternotice. Somehow the data silos never get around to supporting that.

GitHub can't, until at least the the public support is in their favour, because legally it's a hot water. This is not your ordinary copyright DMCA Complaint, this is the section 1201 concerning circumvention, which is held to a different standard. This is essentially RIAA telling GitHub "if you're not stopping this, we'll see you (not the YT-DL developers) in court".

> GitHub can't, until at least the the public support is in their favour

Public support on which grounds?

I can’t see any evidence a counter notice was filed until the EFF got involved, at which point GitHub immediately reinstated YouTube-dl.

Did GH ignore a counter notice?

twitch actually does do that IIRC, not sure about others

Laws need teeth to be enforced. It used to be illegal to harbor runaway slaves, or to be a Catholic priest in Protestant England. So people built cleverly hidden Priest Holes[1] in houses to hide. But you can't really build the equivalent of a Priest Hole within Github, because Github is not your house, but rather your lord's castle.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Priest_hole

> blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide by the law (Github)

What about those abusing [a misrepresentation of] the law (the RIAA) and the members who pay their dues (Microsoft)?

It was an unfortunate situation. I don't entirely know how GitHub handled things before the Microsoft acquisition but it also wouldn't surprise me if Microsofts legal department is more risk adverse compared to GitHub internal.

> I would blame the law (DMCA), not those forced to abide by the law (Github)

It seems even in the context of US-based companies that some companies are a little more "trigger-happy" with DMCA and other claims compared to others.

Especially because they worked to try and make sure this wouldn't happen again.