(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.) I understand that you want to extend professional courtesy to the lawyers and programmers involved, and by all m

(I am not a lawyer, this is not legal advice.) I understand that you want to extend professional courtesy to the lawyers and programmers involved, and by all measures, I think you should do so. However you must understand that the DMCA takedown procedure is not a human; it is a legal robot. By invoking DMCATakedownBot, they have not extended you proper courtesy, and probably the correct action is to file the counter-notification. Your counter-notification can point out that the original legal letter to GitHub was largely not a 'notification of claimed infringement' under 17 USC § 512 (c) (3) (A) [the "safe harbor"/"takedown" requirement of GitHub] -- because it claimed that the injury was a violation of 17 USC § 1201, which is not about copyright infringement. You should point out that there is a claimed infringement in this notice -- "He has taken proprietary source code from inside of our application" -- but that this claimed infringement is outright false, you have not copied any source code from inside of their application. So the 'safe harbor' DMCA takedown notice (§ 512) is probably not a proper venue for the legal discussion to occur. Rather, the proper venue is described in § 1203; they should bring a civil action against you in a US district court for the actual damages and any additional profits of the violator, or statutory damages per violation. You can then add to this notice something about how you'd much rather attempt to sort this out in a one-to-one discussion with the aggrieved programmers at the company, rather than in court. You can also tell them that section 1203 (c) (5) allows a court to remit the total award of damages if you can prove to the court's satisfaction that you were not aware and had no reason to believe that your acts constituted a violation. Since this is not legal advice so much as "advice on what you can say to lawyers to get them off your back", I will recommend that you read the relevant laws here: http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17 http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17 I also recommend that if they do sue you under section 1203, you contact a lawyer. You might also consider contacting a copyright lawyer right now, if it's not too much hassle.