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Comment by viraptor | Hacker News Reader

Most of this is irrelevant. The process is (more or less, read up on DMCA for details): someone sends notice, GH as a provider takes down content until counterclaim from the repo owner, then the 2 parties can battle it in court.

I doubt any repo owner will want to challenge anything here. Unless they have EFF behind them trying to prove a point or something like that.

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So basically, guilty until proven innocent.

Not complying with DMCA doesn’t directly get into legal trouble. It’s not a crime and doesn’t create (itself) any civil liability.

What it does do is forfeit a safe harbor defense against copyright infringement liability. Basically, as long as you comply with take down requests, you can’t be sued for copyright infringement unless you knew about it.

It’s part of a quid pro quo with online services that publish user content.

Other publishers are liable for what they publish even if they didn’t know about it.

Without the DMCA, Google would be liable for all the piracy that happens on the site.

This isn’t a criminal case so the process doesn’t involve guilt. It actually allows everyone to stay out of court. Unless the copyright holder then sues the uploader.

But how can the repo owner do that if the complainant is anonymous?

The counterclaim is sent to the provider, so in this case GitHub.

Also the original claim was not anonymous. The source just wasn't made public. See https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2023/06/2023-06-2...

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