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Why does GitHub anonymize DMCA takedown requests?
- benologist 15y agoWhy would they publish the sender's contact information? More disturbing is that Sony requested all available contact information for the offending users .... it would be much more interesting to ask if GitHub honor that.
- duncan_bayne 15y agoWhy would they not? On one hand, the person sending the takedown request is afforded the courtesy of anonymity. This, while he (or she) is accusing someone who is most certainly not anonymous of breaking the law, & demanding the identities of other users. That is unfair, & unjust.
- benologist 15y agoThese are two unrelated things in my opinion: 1) GitHub is anonymizing the sender on DMCA notices they publish. They anonymize it because they're not The Pirate Bay exploiting someone else's work and keeping teh internets riled up so the ad impressions keep coming. You should not expect them to instigate or facilitate or even just enable retaliation, they gain nothing and risk plenty by taking a more antagonistic approach to publishing DMCA notices. 2) Sony hopes a DMCA can be used in lieu of a subpoena. This is not the same as removing senders.
- duncan_bayne 15y agoI'd express it slightly differently: A Sony employee is publicly accusing a non-anonymous GitHub user of breaking the law, and at the same time demanding the identities of GitHub users in the hopes that GitHub will comply out of courtesy (i.e. without a subpoena). At the same time, GitHub is providing him or her with anonymity.
- benologist 15y agoRight, but it's just a coincidence that it's Sony and that they're also hoping to get that stuff - GitHub's policy is to always anonymize the sender regardless.
- duncan_bayne 15y agoYes, that's true. My question was why that's their default policy. What is the point of anonymizing requests? I certainly had no expectation of anonymity when I employed the DMCA to take down unauthorised copies of my software from download sites.
- benologist 15y agoSo as not to cause problems for themselves or others. Imagine you're a legal guy at bigcorp and you issue a DMCA because some clown uploaded [something shiny] to GitHub ... and then 10s or 100s of thousands of people got pissed off it was removed, and shown your phone number, email, etc. It's really a good policy for them to have - they don't need the fallout from people harassing some guy or some company, and the internet's always looking for an excuse to be outraged.
- duncan_bayne 15y agoLooks like GitHub would only honor the request for user details if presented with a subpoena.