[beervirus]

Github didn’t steal anything. Some random person downloaded the code and posted it on github without its copyright notice. And Github’s DMCA takedown process is pretty much the same as everybody else’s.

This is an unhappy story, but really, how would you like things to work? Github isn’t in the business of adjudicating copyright ownership, nor should it be.

[thorough]

If someone posted copyright information in say, the forum area of your personal website, and someone from the website containing that information emails you about it, you might actually find yourself doing some basic due diligence and just removing the code.

If you are a large corporation that doesn't have enough resources to do even this kind of bare-bones investigation because you have too many users per employee, you would probably come up with a process like this instead and lean on that process to guide you.

That would be reasonable in your situation, but it is perfectly fair for someone to say, "They should avoid getting themselves in that situation so that they don't have to make simple things so hard for individual people. The Internet is too dominated by ultra-scaled companies. It would be better if the companies operating in it were smaller."

I went to two colleges, one with tens of thousands of students and one with fewer than two thousand. When some paperwork issue came up, it was so nice to be able to go talk to someone in the accounting office and be treated like an adult instead of having to talk to a student working making barely above minimum wage who has to treat me like a stranger off the street because he deals with so many people. There are downsides to scale.