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DMCA Takedown – Popular PHP Barcode Removed

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42 pointskernelcurry47 comments

Strangely, I agree with the original author who sent the DMCA.

Imagine that you're working on some project and you find one of those forks with no GPLv3 attached (or worse, some other license that is more permissive). You integrate it, publish, and then find out that your project is in copyright violation.

I'd rather see a takedown induce an easily remediated repo change, than a big legal PITA down the road. It's not like he took his repo down, nor any of the forks that kept the license. He just DMCA'd the ones that stripped the license files.

Yeah, you could maybe argue that DMCA is kind of heavy handed but for a change it doesn't seem to be an abuse, it's actually being used for what it was intended. In particular the fact that he went through the trouble of spelling out exactly what was being violated, gave a number of rather reasonable ways to address the violation, and provided links to replacement repos for the code in question I think shows that some time and consideration was spent on this. This wasn't just your run of the mill blanket "OMGZ MY IP!" type of DMCA request we're used to seeing from media companies and certain large corporations.

So... is the TL;DR that a GPL3 project on github is DMCA'ing a bunch of github forks that stripped the copyright/authorship notices?

That's what I get from it.

LGPL, even.

Seems reasonable if they copied the code and stripped all attribution and licenses.

Instead of a takedown request, it would probably have made more sense to ask those projects to add the required license information.

If the complaint is to be believed, most of these weren't really 'projects' but just copies of the original source code.

The kind of copies one does to be safe in the case the original repo disappears for some reason. Ironic.

Usually using the "fork" option suffices... these changed the original repo to remove GPL and such.

According to the notice, they were unchanged or mostly unchanged forks of the master.

I presume one wouldn't strip copyright in those cases.

They didn't. The master repository did, they probably weren't aware of the issue.

Thank goodness GitHub doesn't employ the YouTube 3-copyright-strike system. Otherwise there would actually be an issue with this.

What if he did? You have no idea if he did or didn't, you can't assume that the first action he took was to send a DCMA notice.

The second option under "remedy the infringement" is to add the license back to the projects, but a DMCA request is not the right way to ask for that.

That was an option that he gave (towards the bottom). I have no idea if GH passes these on to the repo owner or not. GH may have just removed the repos.

But, the original author did give that option.

github is pretty accommodating to DMCA notifications [1]. They give the infringing repo 24 hours to comply with the terms of the notice.

1. https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown-policy/

While I agree with you, if they went through the trouble to copy the code and strip out the obvious attribution and license information, I'd have a hard time believing they didn't do it with intent. I'm no DMCA fan but you'll have a hard time selling me that this was an honest mistake that is easily remedied via some friendly emails. But maybe I'm wrong.

Well maybe that first one was. But all the others that forked from it probably had no idea what was missing.

If I didn't botch counting, there were 69 of them. Thats a lot of projects to deal with. Dealing with a single point of contact (Github's DMCA procedure) is a lot more efficient than dealing with 69 points of contact.

What crazyness is this? A DMCA we're not raging against??

well people here are infringing a GPL license by stripping it from the original code. I agree with that. All my projects on github are GPL so I'd do the exact same thing in the same circumstances.

The DMCA is only bad when it's used to defend non-free copyrights.

Question. Is stripping the authors names OK? Obviously stripping the license isn't, but does the GPL require you to "advertise" all contributors? I thought that was considered a problem with one of the BSD variants.

Looking back through Github's DMCA history, Tecnick.com has sent a fair number of DMCA takedown notices in the last couple months. Looks like they're in crackdown mode.

used this in the past but nothing current. interesting to see but it does seem the DCMA request is valid considering what I've been reading about all the stripped gplv3 and other references to OP. Now for somebody fork it from a recent pull and put in the required licensing and references as, from what I understand, this repo had nice improvements from the OP. Just a matter of time now.

It's a bit ironic that the original author's website's favicon looks a lot like a Microsoft Windows 95 icon.

Have been using this repo for a long time now, and now deploys are broken :( going to have to re-write some code i guess...

Should probably use https://github.com/tecnickcom/tc-lib-barcode or https://github.com/tecnickcom/TCPDF both of which are mentioned in the DMCA notice.

And do a license review to see if the gplv3 license imposes any cconditions on the use of the code.

GPLv3 doesn't impose any conditions on use. This is LGPLv3, which has even fewer requirements.

Actually it does which is kind of the point, it's just those conditions are fairly easy to meet. The TL;DR: version is that if you use LGPL code in your project you have to redistribute the source code of that LGPL code including copyright notices. In practice that requirement can usually be fulfilled by simply providing a link someplace convenient to wherever you original got the code from yourself so it's pretty easy to comply with. Additionally GPL and LGPL differ primarily in that GPL requires that code that uses it must itself be licensed under GPL, where as LGPL allows non-LGPL code to be linked to LGPL code (so long as the conditions of the LGPL code are still being met, primarily the distribution clause). The big difference between GPLv2 and GPLv3 was mostly about closing some loopholes that some companies (primarily TiVo) used to make it impossible to modify certain GPL code on their devices (mainly this involved using hardware DRM). This obviously violated the spirit of the GPL because the whole point is to allow for people to tinker with the code, and preventing that by coupling it to proprietary hardware as a end run around the GPL necessitated the creation of GPLv3 specifically to make doing that a violation of the license.

Never mind, didn't see that it was LGPL.

And I was thinking of the AGPL3, which would affect usage.

> GPLv3 doesn't impose any conditions on use.

This is not true, GPLv3 has use conditions which are conditioned on the target market of the product.

> This is LGPLv3, which has even fewer requirements.

OTOH, this is true.

https://tldrlegal.com/license/gnu-lesser-general-public-lice...

GPLv3 doesn't have any use conditions; it's free to use, for any purpose. You are probably thinking of the conditions on the things that aren't use - modification, distribution, etc.

Or not deploy from random repos you don't control.

But that would be obvious.

But... the cloud?

If you've been using the repo for a long time and you didn't have a local copy to use in case github went down, etc, your deploy was already broken. Having local mirrors of third party repos, and pulling those into your build system is fairly trivial, and will save a lot of heartache in cases like this.

Especially if you want to be sure that a version you pegged exactly for stability will be around in a year or two (looking at you node land).

If I knew someone was deploying from one of my repos, changing my code to make their site ALL PONIES ALL THE TIME U GUISE would honestly occur to me.

It would occur to me, and I might not be strong enough to resist.

PONIES!

And they are down.... "This repository is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown notice"

So who first deleted the license and copyright notices?

Either @dineshrabara stripped them since the first commit is based on an official release three days earlier and lacks the notices or they copied it from someone who moved really fast to do so and distributed them in some mysterious third location. The former seems more likely.

ETA: An HN account of the same name was created 235 days ago, so it's probably the same person if they choose to respond.

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