I believe the text of the DMCA is written to cause this. If you are an ISP, and you don't want to be liable for infringments, you have to take things down after receiving a DMCA takedown notice. The end.
You can put it back up after the user has followed the right procedure to challenge and assume liability themselves. I admit I'm not sure exactly what procedure the DMCA outlines for this.
I think what ISP's _could_ do is facilitate user's filing challenges more easily. But they've got to take it down after receiving a takedown request, that's pretty much what the law says (or else the ISP can be sued for the copyright infringement too).
Theoretically you can sue someone for issuing a takedown request in bad faith. Perhaps ISP's could help their users do this too, but it could get sticky for them.
The fact is that while section 512(f) of the DMCA provides consequences to misrepresentations by those making takedown requests, it is damned impossible to actually enforce that.
Now, I guess an ISP _could_ individually evaluate each DCMA takedown request, decide that some of them are completely illegitimate and there was in fact no infringing material, and thus that they have little legal risk to leaving it up, and probably nobody's going to take them to court over it, and if someone does, the ISP will probably still win and they're willing to deal with it.
I think it's pretty obvious that it's not really reasonable to expect a business to do this (by assigning an actual lawyer to evaluate every request? By trusting less trained/certified people to make the determination? Even paying them minimum wage it's probably not affordable), although it would be pretty exciting if one decided to anyway.
http://www.diynetwork.com/about-us/dmca-digital-millennium-c...
But yes, effectively, it is not reasonable for a company to ignore the takedown request.
This needs to be done by larger companies. Right now all a person has to do is claim copyright infringement, and companies take down. There is a guy on Ebay who claimed he owned the copyright to a old watch making school workbook(Chicago School of Watch Repair). Well he didn't own the copyright, but Ebay wouldn't even bother to look into it. There should be clear penalties for falsely claiming ownership to a copyright? I understand small companies caving in, but larger companies should do a little due diligence?
Yes, see, that's the law. That's the way the DMCA is written. If someone files a DMCA takedown, companies have to take it down (or risk liability themselves). Right.
To change it, Congress would need to change it, there's nothing larger companies can do.
You know, like a mad-lib "Your site has our content askjdh12312312.avi on the link yourtube.io/5h0rtur1/ and must be removed to comply with yadda yadda yadda".
It's probably five kinds of illegal and three kinds of immoral, though.
Bot or not, this is an intentional action by Qualcomm. Github should push back against this if it wants to remain credible in the open source community. Are there some general provisions in the law that allow it to respond to abuse (which this is a clear case of) with their own lawsuit?
Of course, the Qualcomm repository should be pulled. Permanently.
They're the employees who will have to get in and make changes to the system and they work for the companies that have to make noise and say no to the DMCA issuers.
If they blanket exclude their own employees of the policies everyone else has to abide, well, that'll say something won't it. There seems to be no negative effect of making false DMCAs so play that game.
Unprosecuted crimes (e.g. the perjury one must commit to file a false DMCA notice) have a strange way of suddenly becoming prosecuted crimes when people act in blatant disregard for the law.
So if you say, "I'm requesting you take this down because it infringes on Star Wars and I'm an authorized agent of Disney" when you have no relation with Disney, you're up for perjury.
However, if you say, "I'm requesting you take this down because it infringes on blahblah.avi and I hold copyright to blahblah.avi" which is true, then no perjury penalty. Even if blahblah.avi has nothing to do with the github repo being taken down. "Oops, my bad, honest mistake, wink wink." The person on the receiving end of the DMCA still has to jump through all the hoops to get their own copyright material reinstated.
So if you do your bot right, there's no penalty. None at all. If there is, I'd love to know about it, because these bots need to die in a fire.
> Qualcomm is the owner of an exclusive copyright for each of these documents. Cyveillance is authorized to act on behalf of Qualcomm, and has a good faith belief that the publication and/or disclosure by your web site is not authorized by Qualcomm, any of Qualcomm’s agents, or the law. I certify, under penalty of perjury, that the information in this notice is accurate.
The pertinent document: https://github.com/CyanogenMod/android_device_sony_huashan/b...
[1]: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-07-02-Qualco...
Recently I found that one of my popular posts on startups had been boosted without permission or credit by some wannabe-accelerator in Texas. I filed a DMCA request and their host took the page down promptly. It just worked.
I'd hope Github is doing some basic checks on requests like this. But I don't want them to try to become a mini-court. We already have a perfectly good court system for resolving ownership disputes.
You're not allowed to do that without losing the safe harbor provisions of the DMCA. Anything that shows up that matches the format must be obeyed. That's why counter-notifications exist.
Certainly I don't see anything in the law itself that prevents them from verifying that the notice actually comes from the entity claimed, or saying, "Hey buddy, are you sure you really own that?" Which is all I meant by basic checks.
Are you aware of some case law that demonstrates otherwise?
On what do you base your guess? Because as I understand it, your guess is 100% wrong.
One, if I read the safe harbor stuff correctly, then if you ignore a DMCA notice it means you can now be sued for hosting the content. If a host decides they are willing to run that risk, I believe they can happily ignore a DMCA notice.
Two, basic business knowledge. YouTube partners with a lot of the major media companies, and taking down large volumes of their stuff in a way that looks dumb would harm their partnerships. Companies are very reluctant to bite the hand that feeds them.
Three, if someone could take down everything on YouTube by forging a zillion DMCA notices, I expect some enterprising troublemaker would have done it long ago just for the lulz.
Ok! Your turn. What's your evidence? Because that's what I asked for before and nobody replied.
Also, I have heard of this happening with people sharing open source software on bit torrent. This isnt the original article I read but the closest one I could find.[1]
[1] http://max-technology.blogspot.com/2008/12/open-source-torre...
Even in a notice and takedown system, the time required to act on the notice could be increased to ensure that the target has an opportunity to counternotice, and the counternotice could be made immediately effective, rather than effective with a delay.
But the opportunity for counternotice seems like a great idea, perhaps including some discretion for the hosting company. When the DMCA was written, they would have had to allow for a relatively long period. But now that we all have the internet in our pockets, it seems like a few days or maybe a week would be plenty of time.
Patent trolls are ok too ?
http://www.theonion.com/video/nations-parents-release-annual...
http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=perfectly%20g...
While I agree with the sentiment, this statement is a bit extreme. Especially since it's a distributed system so you're not exactly losing your work. Also, you can get it back online if you jump through the flaming hoops. In reality there is no better option for hosting OSS code right now than GitHub.
You're right that your code isn't permanently lost, but you're wrong that GitHub is the only option or even the best option for hosting your code. GitLab and gogs are incredible pieces of software and if your needs are small, you can even just use cgit or the built-in gitweb tool. DigitalOcean is one host that can trivially provision GitLab instances.
I've hosted my own git server for about a year at https://stealthis.ca. It costs less money than GitHub's cheapest plan and supports unlimited mirrors and private repositories with any amount of collaborators. It also has never went taken my code offline, ever, for any reason. You can guess what'd happen if somebody sent me a DMCA request.