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Comment by jrm4 | Hacker News Reader

Love it.

The question, especially for the folks around here.

When Github eventually takes a stronger stand against this sort of thing, because it is 100% going to happen, are folks going to properly fight it?

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They were DMCAed, they got bad press out of it, they eventually stood up for the developer in exchange for a token concession (deleting test data that referred to copyrighted music and was named in the complaint): https://github.blog/2020-11-16-standing-up-for-developers-yo... , and reversed the takedown unilaterally (which would mean the claimant could take github/microsoft to court if they felt like it).

Whether it's a matter of principles or just the bad press from the initial takedown is less clear, but I think it'll be a while before they re litigate this issue.

I still can't access my fork of YouTube DL with all my custom plugin work on GitHub

Why not? Did you forget your GitHub password?

They blocked everyones forks at the same time as the original.

What does "blocked" mean? Is your fork still "blocked"?

Blocked meant that when I tried to view my fork I got a DMCA page. There were some instructions about how to merge in the changes or something but I didn't have time at the time.

Oh, so if you merge in the changes from the original repo that remove the copyrighted music URL from the test data, then your repository will work again?

Yes I think that was the instructions. But I forgot where I kept my local copy of the repo, and it was far behind the current master head. I was just parsing wfmu playlist to make track meta-data.. probably if I did it again I would write it better anyway.

> (which would mean the claimant could take github/microsoft to court if they felt like it)

I can't imagine that ever happening. But what I can imagine is the media groups giving Microsoft a hard time on whatever deals they have in the Xbox ecosystem, pressuring until GitHub unilaterally reverses their reversal, or does something else to satisfy them.

Lawyer here. Forest/Trees, people. It may not ever come to "litigation," there are so many other ways to make this happen.

I suppose I should be a bit clearer. When Microsoft and the big media people get together to try to make it go away, what will be the the response?

I suspect it will simply move to being hosted on gitlab or similar. Less discoverable, but likely available.

> are folks going to properly fight it?

I hope so. I would really like to see git hosting as a Tor hidden service.

Against forking an inactive project? Why?

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