[sp332]

Instead of a takedown request, it would probably have made more sense to ask those projects to add the required license information.

[dlanouette]

That was an option that he gave (towards the bottom). I have no idea if GH passes these on to the repo owner or not. GH may have just removed the repos.

But, the original author did give that option.

[jcoby]

github is pretty accommodating to DMCA notifications [1]. They give the infringing repo 24 hours to comply with the terms of the notice.

1. https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/

[tzs]

If I didn't botch counting, there were 69 of them. Thats a lot of projects to deal with. Dealing with a single point of contact (Github's DMCA procedure) is a lot more efficient than dealing with 69 points of contact.

[ascendantlogic]

While I agree with you, if they went through the trouble to copy the code and strip out the obvious attribution and license information, I'd have a hard time believing they didn't do it with intent. I'm no DMCA fan but you'll have a hard time selling me that this was an honest mistake that is easily remedied via some friendly emails. But maybe I'm wrong.

[sp332]

Well maybe that first one was. But all the others that forked from it probably had no idea what was missing.

[dubcanada]

What if he did? You have no idea if he did or didn't, you can't assume that the first action he took was to send a DCMA notice.

[sp332]

The second option under "remedy the infringement" is to add the license back to the projects, but a DMCA request is not the right way to ask for that.

[dublinben]

If the complaint is to be believed, most of these weren't really 'projects' but just copies of the original source code.

[tacone]

The kind of copies one does to be safe in the case the original repo disappears for some reason. Ironic.

[striking]

Usually using the "fork" option suffices... these changed the original repo to remove GPL and such.

[tacone]

According to the notice, they were unchanged or mostly unchanged forks of the master.

[yuvipanda]

I presume one wouldn't strip copyright in those cases.

[tacone]

They didn't. The master repository did, they probably weren't aware of the issue.

[striking]

Thank goodness GitHub doesn't employ the YouTube 3-copyright-strike system. Otherwise there would actually be an issue with this.