I love it when non-lawyers misread legal documents.
The TOS says that Github will take down the offending content (or if, necessary, account), not the copyright owner's account. Most copyright owners do not have Github accounts. Github is not a thing people use outside of programming.
Their thermonuclear bomb was to take down other people's repos, ban accounts, and make random threats.
This is the proper response to the petulant behavior of techies flaunting the original takedown. The end result would simply have been the RIAA issuing more requests, possibly even formal requests, which Github would have led Github to doing the same thing it did proactively.
You know why did it? To protect people from the legal consequences of their stupidity. Lawsuits are expensive, especially when you're in the wrong and the other side has a very large legal budget.
They can be the good guy, and fight the RIAA. They can be a neutral party, and do their duty under DMCA. But fighting the RIAAs battles for then, and then making comments like Nat's? Sketchy and sleazy.
Being the good guy in this situation is not fighting the RIAA. It's doing what the law requires to prevent disruption of services to their other customers, most of whom aren't opening flaunting the law.
Outside of the tech world, to the extent that people care about this conflict, they're wondering why techies are so intent on bullying non-techies just trying to protect their work. Outside of tech, people are struggling and many are unemployed. This is a PR battle that tech is losing.
> The TOS says that Github will take down the offending content (or if, necessary, account)
No. It doesn't say "offending content." It says "repeat infringers of this policy," referring to the aforementioned paragraphs.
> Github is not a thing people use outside of programming.
Which is increasingly close to zero major industries.
> The end result would simply have been the RIAA issuing more requests, possibly even formal requests, which Github would have led Github to doing the same thing it did proactively.
Exactly, and the opportunity for people with non-infringing uses, such as myself, to pick up the torch. It's a lot easier to take down youtube-dl than it is to take down obviously non-infringing educational tools used by kids to learn from home during a pandemic.
> It's doing what the law requires to prevent disruption of services to their other customers, most of whom aren't opening flaunting the law.
The law requires a very specific process. github went above and beyond that process, for no positive reason. The safe harbor provisions in DMCA hinge on being a "service provider," which is not very well defined, but the provisions were inspired by the concept of a common carrier.
If all I'm doing is hosting people's content, with no control over that, or providing bandwidth, or a caching layer, I shouldn't be liable for the actions of those people. Comcast has no liability for what I send over their network. If I run something illegal on AWS, that's not AWS' liability either. That's reasonable.
There's a fuzzy line from there to a service like github or Youtube, to a service like pip or npm, to something like the Debian package repository. If the Debian package repository, which is controlled and curated by Debian, has infringing content, Debian would almost certainly be liable.
github can be viewed as "like Comcast/AWS" or "like Debian," depending on how much control it exerts over what goes on github. Exerting more control than it absolutely needs to -- as it did in this case -- increases their liability in the long term. This shouldn't put them out of the service provider category, but a pattern of exerting control might.
I just looked over your post history. You've posted a whole bunch of posts which are both legally wrong, and show either fundamental, basic reading comprehension issues with your sources similar to the one in this thread, or you're intentionally spreading misinformation. I'm not sure which. Whatever it is, it's dangerous. You made false claims about the DMCA, github's ToS, and in other threads, about the EFF.
I'll post cites to sources, and then I'm done here.
Thanks, I needed the laugh. I love it when non-lawyers argue with me about the law because they always base their arguments on fundamental misunderstandings about what the law says or how the law works.
The TOS says that Github will take down the offending content (or if, necessary, account), not the copyright owner's account. Most copyright owners do not have Github accounts. Github is not a thing people use outside of programming.
Their thermonuclear bomb was to take down other people's repos, ban accounts, and make random threats.
This is the proper response to the petulant behavior of techies flaunting the original takedown. The end result would simply have been the RIAA issuing more requests, possibly even formal requests, which Github would have led Github to doing the same thing it did proactively.
You know why did it? To protect people from the legal consequences of their stupidity. Lawsuits are expensive, especially when you're in the wrong and the other side has a very large legal budget.
They can be the good guy, and fight the RIAA. They can be a neutral party, and do their duty under DMCA. But fighting the RIAAs battles for then, and then making comments like Nat's? Sketchy and sleazy.
Being the good guy in this situation is not fighting the RIAA. It's doing what the law requires to prevent disruption of services to their other customers, most of whom aren't opening flaunting the law.
Outside of the tech world, to the extent that people care about this conflict, they're wondering why techies are so intent on bullying non-techies just trying to protect their work. Outside of tech, people are struggling and many are unemployed. This is a PR battle that tech is losing.