[smt88]

Flagged for misleading title.

Accurate title: "Someone shared my copyrighted code, and GitHub used software instead of a human to arbitrate".

Not as interesting or unexpected. None of the major platforms for user-generated content could possibly review every claim with human time.

[thorough]

How is the title misleading? It's "My Latest Brush with the Corporate Internet: GitHub has My Stolen Code."

If a website, even one like GitHub that posts others' submissions, had something I felt was mine and I had to go through a complicated process to get them to remove it, an adversarial process no less, I would describe that as a "brush."

If I felt that the process was made more difficult because the other party was a large corporation instead of a small group, and if I felt that there was a movement in the web in that direction, I would think it's reasonable to label the party "the corporate Internet." This kind of metaphor is certainly very common, where a journalist might label a practice by a company like like Facebook or Twitter as being done by "social media" writ large in spite of the fact that neither company is "social media," per se, but more literally a single entity in the large area that goes by that name.

And the statement "GitHub has My Stolen Code" is a very literal bottom-line summary of the source of the writer's contention. Its presence in the headline has the redeeming quality of removing the metaphor from the first half of the headline for readers who might want more specifics before they read the article.

[smt88]

"GitHub has My Stolen Code" makes it sound like:

1. GitHub did something special or intentional in this case.

2. GitHub is running the code.

In fact, when I saw the headline, my first thought was that GitHub was using someone's library in violating of the stated license.

It's also strange that this person published their source code along with the demand that no one reproduce it anywhere.

It's like if Twitter complained about people reproducing tweets. Sure, maybe they are violating your copyright in some way, but copyright is very, very difficult to enforce on a product that can be reproduced billions of times per second across the entire world.

Especially after seeing the code itself (simple forum software that runs on PHP 5.6, which has been unsupported for 2+ years) and that the author has no intention of monetizing it, it just sounds like they were looking for a sensational headline. There seems to be no actual harm happening here.

And as others have said, this is how we'd prefer the web to work: copyright holders have less power, not more.

[thorough]

If you were "looking for a sensational headline" and GitHub intentionally took your copyrighted code and was running it, wouldn't you come up with a more direct statement than "GitHub has my stolen code"?

For example, if I bought a phone on Craigslist and someone said to me, "You have my stolen phone," I would not assume they were accusing me of stealing their phone.

I think the main problem with this headline is that so many have read it as "GitHub has stolen my code," but that is hardly the author's fault.

Maybe he should have written it as, "Someone stole my code and posted it on GitHub" but that would disguise the author's main point, fleshed out in the article, that GitHub is not acting appropriately in this case.