10 ms·

Qualcomm issues DMCA takedowns for 116 GitHub repositories, including their own

180 points by kristofferR 12y ago

deleted 12y ago
[deleted]
brokentone 12y ago
I still don't understand how a bot can sign a takedown request that is executed under the penalty of perjury and why no one has gone after misfilings legally.
- swasheck 12y ago
  whom, or what, will be summoned if it's a bot?
  - Nexxxeh 12y ago
    One would hope whomever's name is attached to the request, as they are responsible for that reqest.
  - quux 12y ago
    The owner or operator of the bot.
  - waps 12y ago
    Same as any other lawyer : sue the firm they represent.
  - Natsu 12y ago
    Proper DMCA notices are supposed to have a signature. Under "Elements of Notification" you can find 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(i) - "A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." Ref: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
- pyre 12y ago
  Because there is no pay-out. You'd be fighting an uphill battle just to see someone get a slap on the wrist. In the legal profession you have to do someone extremely egregious to see any action taken against you. Just look at examples like Jack Thomas, or Prenda Law. It took extreme actions for Bar Associations and Courts to even consider the idea that a lawyer might not be acting in good faith.
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Are you sure? I thought OPG v Diebold ended in a substantial payout after false DMCA filings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold
    - pyre 12y ago
      1. When you're talking at the company-level, $125k seems like a slap on the wrist. For example, do you think that Qualcomm would really change their practices to avoid a $125k fine rather than just accepting it as the cost of doing business? 2. Diebold probably spent significantly more than $125k just in defending the lawsuit, so the end result of forcing them to pay out $125k is more of a moral victory than anything else. 3. The Diebold case had the benefit of the content itself (internal emails discussing issues with voting machines) being unquestionably in the public interest.
  - enraged_camel 12y ago
    >>Because there is no pay-out. You'd be fighting an uphill battle just to see someone get a slap on the wrist. No, it's much more important than that. If you win, it would establish legal precedent, which would make companies think twice before pulling this type of shenanigans in the future.
- josephlord 12y ago
  If it is perjury can you make a criminal complaint to the police?
- smackfu 12y ago
  Only part of it is under penalty of perjury, and that's the part that is true in this case: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."
kristofferR 12y ago
Here's the DMCA takedown notice: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-07-02-Qualcomm.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-07-02-Qualco... As you can see there's a lot of stuff that is unlikely to be copyrighted by Qualcomm in there, like .conf config files.
jameskilton 12y ago
This hit some big ones too. Like Sony's Xperia dev kit: https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/prima https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/prima Lets hope this pisses off enough people to actually go after Qualcomm for such an egregious mis-use of the DMCA.
ASneakyFox 12y ago
I had no idea dmca could be used for source code. I feel like the merits of the claim could require argument. It's not like media where you're very clearly using some ones so g or picture.
- ceejayoz 12y ago
  Copyright's pretty crucial for a lot of software. The GPL, in particular, depends on copyright law to have any useful effect. Why would you think code isn't a creative work but a photo is?
  - nwh 12y ago
    Sort of fuzzy in some countries. In Australia categorising data is something not protected by copyright, say a phone books listings of numbers, because there's only one way to do that and there's no creative process involved. Some code could probably be argued to fit into that as well.
  - gillianseed 12y ago
    All open source software licenses rely on copyright to have any effect, not GPL in particular.
  - ASneakyFox 12y ago
    I'm not saying its not legitimate copyrightable work. I'm saying the claims are hard to verify. There's no content id for closed source code. There's not even manual identification or just skimming to see if the claim might even have merit. All you have is a complaint. This is different from when its say a song. Its not hard to look at the song and say "yep thats metallica".
u124556 12y ago
And then people got the point of gitchain?
- sj4nz 12y ago
  What is this gitchain you write of?
  - klapinat0r 12y ago
    https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain
    - sj4nz 12y ago
      Thank you! This looks like it could be useful for any system that could be threatened by censorship.
  - coherentpony 12y ago
    http://bit.ly/1qBIxNC http://bit.ly/1qBIxNC
    - sj4nz 12y ago
      Oh, that helps a lot, I found that it enhanced the conversation wonderfully. http://bit.ly/1t27WBG http://bit.ly/1t27WBG
      - coherentpony 12y ago
        You're very welcome.
- ossreality 12y ago
  Or god forbid, just git itself.
dchest 12y ago
From one of the repos: /* * This file was originally distributed by Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. * under proprietary terms before Copyright ownership was assigned * to the Linux Foundation. */ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsonyxperiadev%2Fprima%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2FCORE%2FWDI%2FCP%2Fsrc%2Fwlan_qct_wdi_sta.c&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsonyxperiadev%2Fprima%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2FCORE%2FWDI%2FCP%2Fsrc%2Fwlan_qct_wdi_sta.c&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.884j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps... Most of other repos seem to use some sample code from SDKs.
- lucaspiller 12y ago
  To be fair, most of the files do have a proper Qualcomm copyright line in them. It looks like they've just searched for "copyright qualcomm" http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://github.com/AdvInteractions/Sol_3D/blob/master/Assets/Editor/QCAR/Scripts/WebCamEditor.cs http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...
nilved 12y ago
Can people realize by now how ludicrous it is that a bot or idiot is able to take down 116 repositories without any oversight or validation, and your only recourse is to (a) deal with it (b) take time from your day to jump through flaming hoops for bureaucrats? GitHub's brand of DMCA compliance is much like YouTube's: lazy to the point of unequivocally benefiting copyright owners, not content producers. Hosting your code on GitHub is senseless because anybody can take your code down at a moment's notice.
- Hermel 12y ago
  Also questionable is how the computer that sends out the e-mail can have a "good faith belief"? Especially given that their detection rates are often abismal.
  - rasz_pl 12y ago
    You are free to counter claim and go to court spending $xxxK on lawyers to test it.
- Already__Taken 12y ago
  Someone should make a bot that DMCAs accounts belonging to employees and their connections in the parent company. For each unverified DMCA they enact. They're the employees who will have to get in and make changes to the system and they work for the companies that have to make noise and say no to the DMCA issuers. If they blanket exclude their own employees of the policies everyone else has to abide, well, that'll say something won't it. There seems to be no negative effect of making false DMCAs so play that game.
  - sneak 12y ago
    > There seems to be no negative effect of making false DMCAs so play that game. Unprosecuted crimes (e.g. the perjury one must commit to file a false DMCA notice) have a strange way of suddenly becoming prosecuted crimes when people act in blatant disregard for the law.
publicfig 12y ago
This is just as much on Github as it is on Qualcomm. There is no reason Github should grant preliminary takedown on any repository no matter who the client is, and a quick run-through on some of these requests show that many of these were made in error. It should be Github's responsibility to make sure that erroneous claims are not capable of actually removing or blocking content on their service.
- TD-Linux 12y ago
  They are absolutely required to by law immediately. They must wait 2 weeks before putting the files up again to give Qualcomm a chance for further action.
  - deleted 12y ago
    [deleted]
    - wpietri 12y ago
      Yes, and then face one zillion lawsuits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#.C2.A7_512.28f.29_Misrepresentations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...
tigeba 12y ago
Quite a few of them appear to be part of the Qualcomm Vuforia AR Toolkit. I happen to have this lying around from a few years back and the license for the example code seems to be "All rights reserved, Qualcomm Confidential and Proprietary". I suspect this was an oversight they may have corrected so I will be interested to see what happens with the DMCA requests.
- rossjudson 12y ago
  Seems like a lot of people have taken the Vuforia kit and just pushed it into their public source repositories. I don't think there's a problem with using the kit, but Qualcomm apparently doesn't want people incorporating the kit into their repos. You wouldn't normally check a JDK into a repo.
mjg59 12y ago
It's legally unclear whether automated takedown notices (especially when they end up taking down legitimate material) are legitimate or not. The only case I know of was a countersuit in the Warner Brothers/Hotfile case, but unfortunately Hotfile lost the original suit (WB had sued them for copyright infringement), closed and settled both cases. The EFF filed an amicus brief (https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Hotfile.EFF_.Amicus.Brief_.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Hotfile.EFF_.Amicus.Brief... ) arguing that this kind of takedown was illegal. Warner Brothers, unsurprisingly, disagreed (http://www.scribd.com/doc/184407656/warnperj542724ff-69be-4202-a6f7-de772fa4e074 http://www.scribd.com/doc/184407656/warnperj542724ff-69be-42... ), with the primary argument being that the perjury language only refers to the claim that the agent is authorised on behalf of the copyright holder to act on their behalf, and not on the claim that copyright is being infringed.
kjjw 12y ago
Ah Cyveillance is part of QinetiQ. I guess when they're not giving or receiving bribes or orchestrating government sell-offs that result in their management personally gaining huge pools of wealth they take time off to spam DMCA take downs. Makes sense.
raverbashing 12y ago
Yes, I wonder how much Qualcomm payed for these bozos to run grep looking for Qualcomm on several files and take down all that match A lot of them looks like SDKs and stuff Good to know not to waste one second with their products
jrochkind1 12y ago
Do did qualcomm's own repository get taken down, as a result of their overbroad automatically generated request? I really hope so. And I really hope they need to file an official challenge, and then wait two weeks, to get it back again. Like everyone else. That's the best part of the story, they let a drone takedowner loose and actually shot themselves with it.
sobkas 12y ago
Googling for "QUALCOMM Proprietary and Confidential." resulted in a small smirk on my side. So confidential.
joshuak 12y ago
People seem to be misunderstanding the point, and requirements of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. The take down procedure is to allow companies such as Github to avoid being involved in a dispute in any way. Meaning if a lawsuit should occur they don't win because they complied with DMCA they get to avoid the suit altogether. Given one lawsuit can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation even for the winning side, it would be impossible for any ISP to operate in a climate where they could be dragged into every argument over content rights. Github is not the authority. They don't know if the code is inferring or not, so the DMCA says they can defer the authority (and liability) to those who should know, the ones who put the code up in the first place. It is unreasonable to expect Github to vet every open source project, and it is also unreasonable for Github to bare any legal responsibility just because one of their users, or a litigious copyright holder did something wrong. The DMCA Safe Harder is designed specifically to account for this. Although technically possible it is not legally possible to issue a DMCA take down by bot, since a bot can not provide: a statement by the copyright owner, a statement of the accuracy of the notice, or a statement under penalty of perjury that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner. [My opinion is, if a real person uses a bot and then makes these statements under penalty of perjury, then every time that bot makes a mistake we (the tech community) should be filing Amicus curiae[1] with the court that they have perjured themselves. If you are a technically competent person you cannot honestly make a statement that your bot has not made any mistakes without human review.] The weakness of the DMCA Safe Harbor arises not in the above issues but rather in the fact that the DMCA requires that materials be taken down immediately before response by the allegedly infringing party[2]. To balance that (to some degree) if the allegedly infringing party follows the procedure to have the materials restored, then the ISP must restore the materials in 14 days unless the complaining party has shown evidence they have filed a case. In other words if a complaining party fails to immediately follow with a lawsuit the materials MUST be restored. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_curiae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_curiae [2] http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/ http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > To balance that (to some degree) if the allegedly infringing party follows the procedure to have the materials restored, then the ISP must restore the materials in 14 days unless the complaining party has shown evidence they have filed a case. This is not, in fact, true. The provider is not required to restore the materials. The provider is, however, no longer protected from any liability to the user whose material was taken down that would have existed without the DMCA if they don't restore the material in response to a proper counternotice, but most proviers have already structured their contractual relationships with users so that they have no liability for that in the first place, so they don't need the safe harbor from the user, only the one from the copyright owner. Which is the real source of asymmetry -- the safe harbor is superficially symmetrical, but one side is protecting from liability that doesn't exist in the first place, so there is no incentive for compliance.
sitkack 12y ago
Here are some of the files referenced in the takedown https://code.google.com/p/mobile-research-lab-nid/source/browse/trunk/+mobile-research-lab-nid/nikhil_agl/src/com/qualcomm/QCARSamples/FrameMarkers/Texture.java?r=7 https://code.google.com/p/mobile-research-lab-nid/source/bro... https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-msm-mako-3.4-jb-mr1.1/drivers/staging/prima/CORE/VOSS/src/vos_sched.c https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-msm-ma... It looks like there was a Qualcomm Augmented Reality SDK that originated these files. https://developer.qualcomm.com/mobile-development/add-advanced-features/augmented-reality-vuforia https://developer.qualcomm.com/mobile-development/add-advanc...

180 points by kristofferR 12y ago

deleted 12y ago

[deleted]

I still don't understand how a bot can sign a takedown request that is executed under the penalty of perjury and why no one has gone after misfilings legally.

swasheck 12y ago
whom, or what, will be summoned if it's a bot?
- Nexxxeh 12y ago
  One would hope whomever's name is attached to the request, as they are responsible for that reqest.
- quux 12y ago
  The owner or operator of the bot.
- waps 12y ago
  Same as any other lawyer : sue the firm they represent.
- Natsu 12y ago
  Proper DMCA notices are supposed to have a signature. Under "Elements of Notification" you can find 17 U.S.C. § 512(c)(3)(A)(i) - "A physical or electronic signature of a person authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed." Ref: http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html http://www.copyright.gov/title17/92chap5.html
pyre 12y ago
Because there is no pay-out. You'd be fighting an uphill battle just to see someone get a slap on the wrist. In the legal profession you have to do someone extremely egregious to see any action taken against you. Just look at examples like Jack Thomas, or Prenda Law. It took extreme actions for Bar Associations and Courts to even consider the idea that a lawyer might not be acting in good faith.
- wpietri 12y ago
  Are you sure? I thought OPG v Diebold ended in a substantial payout after false DMCA filings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OPG_v._Diebold
  - pyre 12y ago
    1. When you're talking at the company-level, $125k seems like a slap on the wrist. For example, do you think that Qualcomm would really change their practices to avoid a $125k fine rather than just accepting it as the cost of doing business? 2. Diebold probably spent significantly more than $125k just in defending the lawsuit, so the end result of forcing them to pay out $125k is more of a moral victory than anything else. 3. The Diebold case had the benefit of the content itself (internal emails discussing issues with voting machines) being unquestionably in the public interest.
- enraged_camel 12y ago
  >>Because there is no pay-out. You'd be fighting an uphill battle just to see someone get a slap on the wrist. No, it's much more important than that. If you win, it would establish legal precedent, which would make companies think twice before pulling this type of shenanigans in the future.
josephlord 12y ago
If it is perjury can you make a criminal complaint to the police?
smackfu 12y ago
Only part of it is under penalty of perjury, and that's the part that is true in this case: "A statement that the information in the notification is accurate, and under penalty of perjury, that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed."

kristofferR 12y ago

Here's the DMCA takedown notice: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-07-02-Qualcomm.md https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-07-02-Qualco... As you can see there's a lot of stuff that is unlikely to be copyrighted by Qualcomm in there, like .conf config files.

jameskilton 12y ago

This hit some big ones too. Like Sony's Xperia dev kit: https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/prima https://github.com/sonyxperiadev/prima Lets hope this pisses off enough people to actually go after Qualcomm for such an egregious mis-use of the DMCA.

ASneakyFox 12y ago

I had no idea dmca could be used for source code. I feel like the merits of the claim could require argument. It's not like media where you're very clearly using some ones so g or picture.

ceejayoz 12y ago
Copyright's pretty crucial for a lot of software. The GPL, in particular, depends on copyright law to have any useful effect. Why would you think code isn't a creative work but a photo is?
- nwh 12y ago
  Sort of fuzzy in some countries. In Australia categorising data is something not protected by copyright, say a phone books listings of numbers, because there's only one way to do that and there's no creative process involved. Some code could probably be argued to fit into that as well.
- gillianseed 12y ago
  All open source software licenses rely on copyright to have any effect, not GPL in particular.
- ASneakyFox 12y ago
  I'm not saying its not legitimate copyrightable work. I'm saying the claims are hard to verify. There's no content id for closed source code. There's not even manual identification or just skimming to see if the claim might even have merit. All you have is a complaint. This is different from when its say a song. Its not hard to look at the song and say "yep thats metallica".

u124556 12y ago

And then people got the point of gitchain?

sj4nz 12y ago
What is this gitchain you write of?
- klapinat0r 12y ago
  https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain https://github.com/gitchain/gitchain
  - sj4nz 12y ago
    Thank you! This looks like it could be useful for any system that could be threatened by censorship.
- coherentpony 12y ago
  http://bit.ly/1qBIxNC http://bit.ly/1qBIxNC
  - sj4nz 12y ago
    Oh, that helps a lot, I found that it enhanced the conversation wonderfully. http://bit.ly/1t27WBG http://bit.ly/1t27WBG
    - coherentpony 12y ago
      You're very welcome.
ossreality 12y ago
Or god forbid, just git itself.

dchest 12y ago

From one of the repos: /* * This file was originally distributed by Qualcomm Atheros, Inc. * under proprietary terms before Copyright ownership was assigned * to the Linux Foundation. */ http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsonyxperiadev%2Fprima%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2FCORE%2FWDI%2FCP%2Fsrc%2Fwlan_qct_wdi_sta.c&oq=cache%3Ahttps%3A%2F%2Fgithub.com%2Fsonyxperiadev%2Fprima%2Fblob%2Fmaster%2FCORE%2FWDI%2FCP%2Fsrc%2Fwlan_qct_wdi_sta.c&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i58.884j0j4&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8 http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache%3Ahttps... Most of other repos seem to use some sample code from SDKs.

lucaspiller 12y ago
To be fair, most of the files do have a proper Qualcomm copyright line in them. It looks like they've just searched for "copyright qualcomm" http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://github.com/AdvInteractions/Sol_3D/blob/master/Assets/Editor/QCAR/Scripts/WebCamEditor.cs http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:/...

nilved 12y ago

Can people realize by now how ludicrous it is that a bot or idiot is able to take down 116 repositories without any oversight or validation, and your only recourse is to (a) deal with it (b) take time from your day to jump through flaming hoops for bureaucrats? GitHub's brand of DMCA compliance is much like YouTube's: lazy to the point of unequivocally benefiting copyright owners, not content producers. Hosting your code on GitHub is senseless because anybody can take your code down at a moment's notice.

Hermel 12y ago
Also questionable is how the computer that sends out the e-mail can have a "good faith belief"? Especially given that their detection rates are often abismal.
- rasz_pl 12y ago
  You are free to counter claim and go to court spending $xxxK on lawyers to test it.
Already__Taken 12y ago
Someone should make a bot that DMCAs accounts belonging to employees and their connections in the parent company. For each unverified DMCA they enact. They're the employees who will have to get in and make changes to the system and they work for the companies that have to make noise and say no to the DMCA issuers. If they blanket exclude their own employees of the policies everyone else has to abide, well, that'll say something won't it. There seems to be no negative effect of making false DMCAs so play that game.
- sneak 12y ago
  > There seems to be no negative effect of making false DMCAs so play that game. Unprosecuted crimes (e.g. the perjury one must commit to file a false DMCA notice) have a strange way of suddenly becoming prosecuted crimes when people act in blatant disregard for the law.

publicfig 12y ago

This is just as much on Github as it is on Qualcomm. There is no reason Github should grant preliminary takedown on any repository no matter who the client is, and a quick run-through on some of these requests show that many of these were made in error. It should be Github's responsibility to make sure that erroneous claims are not capable of actually removing or blocking content on their service.

TD-Linux 12y ago
They are absolutely required to by law immediately. They must wait 2 weeks before putting the files up again to give Qualcomm a chance for further action.
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
  - wpietri 12y ago
    Yes, and then face one zillion lawsuits: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_Liability_Limitation_Act#.C2.A7_512.28f.29_Misrepresentations http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_Copyright_Infringement_L...

tigeba 12y ago

Quite a few of them appear to be part of the Qualcomm Vuforia AR Toolkit. I happen to have this lying around from a few years back and the license for the example code seems to be "All rights reserved, Qualcomm Confidential and Proprietary". I suspect this was an oversight they may have corrected so I will be interested to see what happens with the DMCA requests.

rossjudson 12y ago
Seems like a lot of people have taken the Vuforia kit and just pushed it into their public source repositories. I don't think there's a problem with using the kit, but Qualcomm apparently doesn't want people incorporating the kit into their repos. You wouldn't normally check a JDK into a repo.

mjg59 12y ago

It's legally unclear whether automated takedown notices (especially when they end up taking down legitimate material) are legitimate or not. The only case I know of was a countersuit in the Warner Brothers/Hotfile case, but unfortunately Hotfile lost the original suit (WB had sued them for copyright infringement), closed and settled both cases. The EFF filed an amicus brief (https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Hotfile.EFF_.Amicus.Brief_.pdf https://www.eff.org/files/filenode/Hotfile.EFF_.Amicus.Brief... ) arguing that this kind of takedown was illegal. Warner Brothers, unsurprisingly, disagreed (http://www.scribd.com/doc/184407656/warnperj542724ff-69be-4202-a6f7-de772fa4e074 http://www.scribd.com/doc/184407656/warnperj542724ff-69be-42... ), with the primary argument being that the perjury language only refers to the claim that the agent is authorised on behalf of the copyright holder to act on their behalf, and not on the claim that copyright is being infringed.

kjjw 12y ago

Ah Cyveillance is part of QinetiQ. I guess when they're not giving or receiving bribes or orchestrating government sell-offs that result in their management personally gaining huge pools of wealth they take time off to spam DMCA take downs. Makes sense.

raverbashing 12y ago

Yes, I wonder how much Qualcomm payed for these bozos to run grep looking for Qualcomm on several files and take down all that match A lot of them looks like SDKs and stuff Good to know not to waste one second with their products

jrochkind1 12y ago

Do did qualcomm's own repository get taken down, as a result of their overbroad automatically generated request? I really hope so. And I really hope they need to file an official challenge, and then wait two weeks, to get it back again. Like everyone else. That's the best part of the story, they let a drone takedowner loose and actually shot themselves with it.

sobkas 12y ago

Googling for "QUALCOMM Proprietary and Confidential." resulted in a small smirk on my side. So confidential.

joshuak 12y ago

People seem to be misunderstanding the point, and requirements of the DMCA Safe Harbor provisions. The take down procedure is to allow companies such as Github to avoid being involved in a dispute in any way. Meaning if a lawsuit should occur they don't win because they complied with DMCA they get to avoid the suit altogether. Given one lawsuit can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in litigation even for the winning side, it would be impossible for any ISP to operate in a climate where they could be dragged into every argument over content rights. Github is not the authority. They don't know if the code is inferring or not, so the DMCA says they can defer the authority (and liability) to those who should know, the ones who put the code up in the first place. It is unreasonable to expect Github to vet every open source project, and it is also unreasonable for Github to bare any legal responsibility just because one of their users, or a litigious copyright holder did something wrong. The DMCA Safe Harder is designed specifically to account for this. Although technically possible it is not legally possible to issue a DMCA take down by bot, since a bot can not provide: a statement by the copyright owner, a statement of the accuracy of the notice, or a statement under penalty of perjury that the complaining party is authorized to act on behalf of the owner. [My opinion is, if a real person uses a bot and then makes these statements under penalty of perjury, then every time that bot makes a mistake we (the tech community) should be filing Amicus curiae[1] with the court that they have perjured themselves. If you are a technically competent person you cannot honestly make a statement that your bot has not made any mistakes without human review.] The weakness of the DMCA Safe Harbor arises not in the above issues but rather in the fact that the DMCA requires that materials be taken down immediately before response by the allegedly infringing party[2]. To balance that (to some degree) if the allegedly infringing party follows the procedure to have the materials restored, then the ISP must restore the materials in 14 days unless the complaining party has shown evidence they have filed a case. In other words if a complaining party fails to immediately follow with a lawsuit the materials MUST be restored. [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_curiae http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amicus_curiae [2] http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/ http://www.chillingeffects.org/dmca512/

dragonwriter 12y ago
> To balance that (to some degree) if the allegedly infringing party follows the procedure to have the materials restored, then the ISP must restore the materials in 14 days unless the complaining party has shown evidence they have filed a case. This is not, in fact, true. The provider is not required to restore the materials. The provider is, however, no longer protected from any liability to the user whose material was taken down that would have existed without the DMCA if they don't restore the material in response to a proper counternotice, but most proviers have already structured their contractual relationships with users so that they have no liability for that in the first place, so they don't need the safe harbor from the user, only the one from the copyright owner. Which is the real source of asymmetry -- the safe harbor is superficially symmetrical, but one side is protecting from liability that doesn't exist in the first place, so there is no incentive for compliance.

sitkack 12y ago

Here are some of the files referenced in the takedown https://code.google.com/p/mobile-research-lab-nid/source/browse/trunk/+mobile-research-lab-nid/nikhil_agl/src/com/qualcomm/QCARSamples/FrameMarkers/Texture.java?r=7 https://code.google.com/p/mobile-research-lab-nid/source/bro... https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-msm-mako-3.4-jb-mr1.1/drivers/staging/prima/CORE/VOSS/src/vos_sched.c https://android.googlesource.com/kernel/msm/+/android-msm-ma... It looks like there was a Qualcomm Augmented Reality SDK that originated these files. https://developer.qualcomm.com/mobile-development/add-advanced-features/augmented-reality-vuforia https://developer.qualcomm.com/mobile-development/add-advanc...