It was admiral that did this: https://blog.getadmiral.com/dmca-easylist-adblock-copyright-...

They even clearly state they used the only tool available to them, DCMA. From all the current summaries on this, DMCA does not apply to a line entry in easylist. A domain can be trademarked.

This should be added back in. And if github cannot standup to DMCA abuse, then well, easylist and all other developers should be giving a clear hard though to their continued use of the github platform.

Edit: it looks like EFF has gotten in touch with easylist. Good. https://torrentfreak.com/dmca-used-to-remove-ad-server-url-f...

So, in that blog post, they state: "We asked them 24 days ago to remove functionalclam[.]com on the original commit."

Their request is here: https://github.com/easylist/easylist/commit/1ba8d4afeec6d562...

And was made by this account: https://github.com/dmcahelper

So, they made a github account the same day they made the "request" with an account that in no way indicates where the request is coming from? The github profile bio reads "Help all parties understand and resolve DMCA issues efficiently and effectively to minimize file and repository impacts."

Perhaps they should have used a bit more transparency when asking for the offending url to be removed from the repo, instead of acting like a spammy copyright boogyman, then immediately resorting to a dubious DMCA takedown request.

I wonder if folks could get sneaky and change the design from a literal url to a regular expression tailored to single out that url but would also include additional sites that are just gibberish and could be relaxed if useful sites ever do fall into the URL overlap. This might be a new line of research to craft regExs to filter out a specific string while also throwing out a bunch of sister gibberish strings that would be unlikely to be adopted simply by virtue of language.

How about having EasyList clients fetch the whole history of the repo?

That way any domain that was ever added would be in the blocklist. True negatives should be pretty low.

Then they would purge it from the repo. In fact, it's questionably the case that they have abided by the DMCA order, for the very reason that it still exists in the repo history. As far as I know, DMCA takedowns normally lead to closing the entire repo.

How about don't host the code at a location which has such hostile laws?

That actually made me think -- is there such location?