Hacker News Reader

Comment by elpocko | Hacker News Reader

>If you're making a claim of copyright infringement, your name [...] is not "private."

I can release stuff under a pseudonym. I don't see why my real name should be published just because someone else is infringing on my rights.

View on HN

AFAIK your real name wouldn't be published (unless you wanted it published).

For example where they said: > it's a DMCA mill, specializing in online porn

DMCA doesn't require copyright owners to give their name or contact info for notices. It just requires an authorized person's information.[1]

So any copyright holder who wants to preserve their anonymity can use a friend, pay one of the many DMCA takedown services online, etc.

Users have to give their real info when counter-claiming though. So it's definitely nice to redact that information, especially when they're innocent and being targeted by fraudulent takedown notices.

[1] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#c_3

[2] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512#g_2_C

By filing a DMCA notice, you are engaging in a system that assumes guilt until proven innocent, a system that is regularly abused to take down completely legal content without any kind of trial.

Ideally, such a system shouldn't exist. But if it does, I think it is only fair that people who use it must reveal their identity.

They do reveal their identity to the court, just not to any Joe Shmoe who stole their work, or to any rando who's looking at a Github repo.

There is no court involved in DMCA takedown notices, unless the hosting service fails to comply. That's the problem.

Maybe, you could sue back for a bad faith incorrect takedown notice. But that's really hard to do if you don't even know who sent the takedown request.

You can get a court involved. Or you, the accused, could simply ask Github for the identity of the claimant. Publishing private details of everyone involved on some website, for everyone to see, is not a prerequisite for due legal process.

When you’re filing a legal claim against someone, they get to know who’s accusing them. That’s only fair.

Maybe the person who infringed on my rights can know. In some cases, as long as my right to privacy is guaranteed to be respected. That doesn't mean that the entire world is entitled to know my real name via Github's issue tracker.

The perpetrator remains anonymous while the victim will be doxxed, what a great sense of fairness you have.

I'm in the US. Your idea violates our justice system's notion of transparency, and it's one I agree with wholeheartedly. Things are different sometimes in cases where the charges involve sexual violence and/or minors, where courts have upheld that the potential damage of publicly naming the victims was worse than the potential damage of not allowing the defendant to publicly counter the accusations. See for example: https://www.gdnlaw.com/blog/internet-law/anonymous-lawsuit-t...

So in the US, at least, if you're going to sue someone over IP violations, you should plan on your identity being made part of the public record. As a country we're pretty adamant about that. It's a feature, not a bug.

I'm including DMCA notices in things I believe should be -- must be -- transparent. They're legal filings after all, strongly implying that if you don't comply, you're about to be sued. Your proposal would allow, say, Oracle to hide their identity if they were filing a complaint against the Linux kernel so that they could get the benefit of launching a legal salvo without the reputation hit for having done so. I believe that's far more unfair, and more likely, than your scenario.

I'm not in the US, and we do not punish victims by publishing their names for everyone to see while keeping the perpetrator unnamed. Our system is much better than yours, we still have a basic notion of privacy and victim protection.

Curiously, Github seems to understand that.

So don't use an American git host then. Find one in a legal jurisdiction that better suits you.

More like: hope your code doesn't get illegally uploaded to GitHub.

No need. Github is already doing the right thing by protecting the victims by not publicly doxxing them by default, because that would be insane. Sucks for you guys I guess.

> I'm not in the US

But DMCA is a US law.

And Github does not seem to be violating DMCA when they redact the claimant's real name for good reasons. So all is well, I guess?

You can request the data from the courts, or whatever. It's not Github's job.

I am happy that you're happy with your system. Conversely, I hate the idea that someone could publicly accuse me of something and I couldn't give a similarly public reply. I would say that our system is much better than yours, you can't defame someone and hide behind legal motions because we still have a basic notion of the rights of the accused.

If a takedown notice is sent, maybe it is because someone's rights are being infringed, or maybe someone is just trying to censor something they don't like, or falsely claim authorship. You seem to be assuming that the fact that the notice was sent means that the sender is definitely a victim and the owner of the repository is definitely the perpetrator. Not always.

The notice and takedown part of DMCA was a reasonable attempt to address a real problem. The main flaw seems to be that bogus takedown notices are never prosecuted, so there's a lot of abuse.

You keep using the words "perpetrator" and "victim" as if it's a given that a person filing a DMCA is always doing so truthfully against an actually-violating project.

I don't have as much faith in the system as you, apparently.

Sometimes the DMCA'd person is the victim, and the complainant is the perpetrator. What is your response to those situations?

My response remains the same: There's no need to publish the victim's name on a website for the whole world to see.

I think the privacy-preserving solution here is to hash the names. That way patterns and abuse can be studied without revealing the identities. Sure, with enough submissions someone can narrow down the identity but it's a good compromise I think.

If you submit often enough that people can determine who you are from the hash, you're probably big enough that you don't really need privacy.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com