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Why would these things remain on sourcehut if they get a DMCA filing? If you do not take the offending material offline, you open yourself to a lawsuit and if y
by zaarn 6y ago
Why would these things remain on sourcehut if they get a DMCA filing? If you do not take the offending material offline, you open yourself to a lawsuit and if you do, new contributors have no way of accessing this data.
Open issues and similar will likely also get lost unless restores, unless you count "exists in someone's inbox/archive" as "the issues and pull requests continue to exist". Because in my opinion, that's barely better than having no backup as all relational data in regards to these things is lost.
- ddevault 6y agoBecause it does not contain offending material.
- zaarn 6y agoNow just supposed it would (someone includes it in the mail text body) and someone would file a DMCA against the mailing list? I can't imagine it would be too unlikely, considering that the mailing list also contains patches and part of YT-dls problems was that the source code and/or documentation included such things. If they popped up during development in a mailing list, it would just as much be a target. "No it doesn't" isn't a valid DMCA defense.
- ddevault 6y agoThen removing the offending material can be done without shutting off the mailing list entirely. I mentioned this in the article. On GitHub, everything - bugs, pull requests, wikis, code - is baked into one thing, your repository, which is taken down as a whole. On SourceHut these features can work just fine independently of one another, and if not all of them contain offending material, there's no reason to turn them all off.
- akerl_ 6y agoThis seems like a weird distinction to make. GitHub could equally delete single issues or single PRs or wiki pages or even single files in a repo. They don’t, but that they don’t isn’t because your GitHub repo is “baked into one thing”, it’s because they’ve chosen to apply the DMCA at the repo level rather than playing whack a mole with your content. Using a mailing list archive instead of an issue list doesn’t change that dynamic. What changes it is that you’ve decided to use more targeted DMCA compliance for SourceHut, which is noteworthy. But the delta here is a policy delta, not a technological limitation on GitHub’s part.
- ddevault 6y agoBut on GitHub, the PRs and issues cannot exist independently of the git repository. They'd have to make substantial software changes to support this approach. Sure, they could do that, but - have they? No. SourceHut has.
- akerl_ 6y agoI’m not sure what you mean. GitHub has gotten a ton of (justified!) criticism because the issues/PRs are not stored in git (either in the main repo, like gh-pages branches, or in an associated repo, like GitHub repo wikis). The “changes” they’d need to make beyond their current DMCA implementation would be to restrict the “Code” tab, the Readme preview, and the git/ssh endpoint for that repo. Which would likely be a new feature, but given they already have the ability for a repo’s owner to totally disable PRs or issues, certainly wouldn’t be the kind of groundbreaking change you’re pitching it as.
- zaarn 6y ago1) Github doesn't bake everything into one thing. They can delete single issues, wiki pages or PRs. 2) Now you'll be playing a game of whack-a-mole with content. The DMCA will likely indicate all infringing content is to be taken down with some examples, so you can start taking down content there but unless you exactly know what content in the repo is infringing, you're likely going to be at the other end of a lawsuit in short order if you don't delete the whole repo.
- ddevault 6y ago>if you don't delete the whole repo. Right, but the repo and the other features are fundamentally not the same thing on SourceHut. It's entirely unnecessary to take down the mailing list (perhaps to take down the archives, but not stop accepting future emails) to comply with a DMCA notice. The mailing list and the repository are not joined at the hip like they are on GitHub. And the service provider is not obliged to be creative in finding the broadest possible scope of infringement: the onus is on the DMCA author to provide a list of infringing material.
- zaarn 6y agoGithub has not joined the issue tracker and the git repo "at the hip", Github is entirely capable of taking down singular issues. Also; the DMCA can simply request you take down the entire repository. You will have to comply with that until further notice, that is how this functions. You're not allowed to investigate or look into the matter a-priori.