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Comment by kstrauser | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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

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.

> 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.

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.

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