What does HackerNews think of dmca?
Repository with text of DMCA takedown notices as received. GitHub does not endorse or adopt any assertion contained in the following notices. Users identified in the notices are presumed innocent until proven guilty. Additional information about our DMCA policy can be found at
If I understand your example correctly, you would take an existing SaaS's ToS (i.e. copy their copyrighted work), publish it as your own (i.e. lie) and then file a DMCA takedown request (i.e. commit perjury) to force them to remove their ToS? Yes, you could do that. But since you likely can't demonstrate that you're the original copyright holder (e.g. trivially their SaaS pre-dates your service and they probably have internal documents like e-mails surrounding the drafting of the ToS whereas you don't unless you forge those as well) and sending a DMCA takedown request for works you don't actually own is literally a felony crime, I don't think that's a winning strategy.
To be clear: yes, there are laws against abusing DMCA takedown requests, precisely because otherwise anyone could just send them out for fun. Specifically DMCA takedown requests include a statement under penalty of perjury from the copyright holder that they hold the copyright. So this isn't a special DMCA law but just a boring old felony crime involved in fraudulently filing illegitimate legal claims.
If you're wondering why you've never heard of this it's probably because you're thinking of sites like YouTube which don't actually receive DMCA takedown requests normally but instead provide an arbitration system to allow content owners to avoid messy legal back-and-forths over the back of Google and instead be trusted based on who they are (i.e. smaller creators will be stuck in appeals limbo trying to talk to a human whereas large corporations will usually be trusted by default). This does not however apply to e.g. GitHub, which is why there is a public collection of DMCA takedown requests hosted by them: https://github.com/github/dmca
To speed up this conversation: if you can think of another example where your conclusion is "but this is dumb" then it's likely because your example is, not the legal situation you're looking at. Also "but this is dumb" is not a counter-argument to "this is what the law is like". The law does not care if you think it is dumb and saying it is dumb is not a good defense if you end up in court.
If true than it was not through the normal DMCA process of GitHub that would result in a public[1] take-down notice being filed for transparency.
[1] https://github.com/github/dmca [2] https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/03/2022-03-1...
At the end of the day GitHub has to comply with the law, whether they like it or not. And looking through that list of DMCA notices many of them seem fairly valid on the face of it.
https://twitter.com/_mph4/status/1470343429599211528
https://twitter.com/christophetd/status/1470346676053422081
This is surprising, considering what is outlined in a previous comment[1]. I hope GitHub provides more transparency on the takedown actions for "malicious content / exploits" like they do for DCMA notices[2].
Apologies for making wrong assumptions. I removed the original Tweet (see screenshot[3] for the original).
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29538151
Too bad they haven't even gotten to that part, because i can't find[0] their dmca[1] or the counter notice
git fetch https://github.com/github/dmca 225ce7ac70aec3002599ba4cc8cee7197e0f1cee
So... can someone push that please? I don't have the recent commits. :-(
Since we’re fiddling with things in this way, if you were just trying to get a copy of the contents, this’ll do that about most efficiently:
git init
git fetch --depth=1 https://github.com/github/dmca pull/8142/head
git checkout FETCH_HEAD