[woofie11]

gitlab isn't evil. One of my short life lessons is that, in general, when I do business with evil, sketchy, or nasty organizations or people, I generally come out behind.

If the good guys have an inferior product and charge double, I'll sometimes pick the bad guy. And more often than not, I get burned, costing me tenfold what it would have cost to just go with the high-integrity choice in the first place.

I'm not leaving github over this, but I'm mostly starting new project on gitlab instead.

[speeder]

I've been using GitLab for a while now.

GitHub did many, many decisions that I found sketchy.

[res0nat0r]

Gitlab enforces DMCA requests. If you're a reputable company wanting to do legit business in the USA you have to follow the process, it really isn't up to Github or Gitlab unless they want to lose safe harbor status.

https://about.gitlab.com/handbook/dmca/

[woofie11]

As well they should! Following the laws is part of not being sketchy.

github went way above-and-beyond here. It is under no obligation to:

1) Enforce an invalid DMCA request

2) Take down forks and repos from other users, without DMCA requests

3) Threaten to ban users

DMCA has a simple, neutral process. github receives a request. It's required to take down that specific tool if it's a valid request (NOT everyone who forked it). The developer who owns that repo can then put that up. At that point, github brings that repo back, and gives the RIAA means to file litigate against the developer. It's inspired by the concept of a common carrier, where github would be acting as a neutral party, not a thuggish policeman-for-hire.

If github ignored DMCA requests, I wouldn't do business with them either. I expect them to be a neutral third party, as the law dictates.

[qw3rty01]

How was the DMCA request invalid?

[a1369209993]

I assume others are downvoting because they assume you already know, but DMCA takedowns apply to active distribution of actual copyrighted content (like a mp3 containing music), not to tools that puportedly are for the purpose of enabling infringment. If the RIAA wanted to take down a tool, the not-illegal method would be to file a lawsuit against the developers, recieve (or preferably be denied, since their case has no merit, but that's beside the point) a preliminary injuction from the judge, and present that to GitHub.

[woofie11]

To be clear, what the RIAA did isn't illegal. They sent a letter. I'm allowed to send a legal demand letter to you demanding 5 donkeys and a cow for having an insulting username, and even phrase it in Very Intimidating Ways. You're also welcome to ignore it. I can even file a law suit. I won't win (and you can then ask the judge for legal fees), but I'm not doing anything illegal.

What github did probably wasn't illegal either. Most companies can fire a customer for no great reason, which github did.

A perfectly reasonable response, I suspect, might be to start sending github large numbers of inane takedown letters similar to the RIAA one, alleging that random tools can circumvent copy protection. For example, vscode, cpython, and many other projects live on github, and can be used to circumvent copy protection too. That's a true statement.

github is welcome to ignore those letters too, since they don't conform to DMCA requirements. Or they can follow them.

In either case, I'm kind of curious what github would do. I suspect if they randomly kill projects, most projects will go somewhere else. github won't be considered a reliable service provider. Or github will re-evaluate their policies to be more reasonable, and not take down projects willy-nilly, which would be a good outcome too.

[qw3rty01]

That's why I asked, because the takedown request wasn't claiming ownership of the youtube-dl code (or that it was just enabling infringement), it was claiming that youtube-dl was breaking DMCA section 1201, which covers circumventing DRM.

[d1zzy]

It's pretty easy, just find a reputable company somewhere outside of the US.