Why OpenHeatMap is banned from Github | Hacker News Reader

Why OpenHeatMap is banned from Github

petewarden.com

197 pointsjoshfraser37 comments

The weird/upsetting thing is that CTO would go to the producer of a software his or her company use for free and despite having active communication lines open go behind the developer's back to have it removed from the very website they got it from.

I believe that the technical term here would be "dick move".

The world is full of people who are quick to jump to conclusions and refuse to give you the benefit of doubt.

I used to use a self hosted blog aggregation software (Gregarius) and put it up at www.mypersonalsite.com/blogs that was unlisted and unlinked to. It got 3 uniques/month for about 12 months. Then one day a company owner (a regular from the Joel on Software's forums -- a technical person) wrote a blog post linking to my site, calling me a spam blog, and posted my personal information. He sent my host a C&D, and also blocked my work IP (most of the local IBM office) from reading his blog.

From what I gather, he looked at his refer logs and saw I clicked through to his blog 2-3 times, went to the link and freaked out that I was displaying his RSS feeds.

I emailed him to try and clear it up, and was quite polite, but he kept being an asshole, accusing me of stealing his content and breaking the law. He threatened me with further action, and was condescending because I was 17. ("You should password protect your 'blog reader' as a learning exercise, then blog about it so you'll have content of your own and you won't have steal my content").

He never reached out to contact me. He just sent the C&D, wrote a nasty blog about me, and didn't even try. Once he jumped to conclusions, it was too late.

Some people are like that. It's frustrating. But it's a good lesson that if you're wrong, you're wrong, nobody owes you a conversation about it and similar people in high stakes venues will deliver swift, harsh, uncompromising justice that can have devestating consequences.

"Great minds discuss ideas. Average minds discuss events. Small minds discuss people." Eleanor Roosevelt

The only thing to add is great minds are more generous and less concerned with violent retribution to compensate for a lack of control in their own frustrated lives.

Others have a 4 letter word for it....

cool.

When harvesting news titles and displaying those like news.google is legal, I thought displaying a RSS feed from a blog site should be legal too! It's not?

What is really B.S. in this is that you can make changes to history then force push changes to git to remove anything. Sure it sucks and Linus would hang you publicly if you did it, but you can do it. The biggest problem is in the forking part. I guess you'd have to contact everyone that had a fork.

If something is really offensive or stolen, it is tough as hell to remove all traces of it- anyone could have a copy. The lesson learned here is if you are that pissed off that someone shared it, the problem is that someone shared it, not the person who took it. Unless it is crack being given to a crack dealer, but that's different. Git repos aren't crack houses. Not usually. Ok, maybe some of them. But not many. Just one? Ok just one.

The CTO was likely saying "this sloppy developer isn't responding, I've got to escalate this somehow".

To me, this really emphasizes the importance of communications, followup (the human timeout and retry factor, especially when the Github people are hinting that they replied and it was somehow missed), and patience instead of kneejerk reactions.

Would be nice, if the dick had a name....

That's funny. The Github page (https://github.com/petewarden/openheatmap) says it was disabled due to "excessive use of resources, in violation of our Terms of Service."

I also didn't find anything here: https://github.com/github/dmca

GitHubber here, we'll follow up on this with Pete. We think one of our replies was missed along the line. Thanks for letting us know.

any comment on the process (or lack there of)?

hopefully there is a documented process so that one doesn't have to make a blog article to post on HN to get this stuff resolved.

As Paul mentioned above, Pete was doing the correct thing in contacting our support.

It seems he unfortunately missed one of our replies and therefore considered us unresponsive.

It doesn't sound like the OP tried very hard to contact them. He sent them an email, didn't hear back, and then decided to write a blog post about it. I mean, if he cared that much about github, he would send them an email back asking what was up. Or 5.

There are always things like real people and phone numbers. You know, find some GH staffers via G+, LinkedIn, Fb or your own network of friends and work some connections. Pete does not say the lengths he went to, but email is admittedly one of the most passive mediums.

You really should not have to find people working at GitHub on other parts of the internet for something like dealing with copyright issues if you're not the copyright owner because (I suspect) copyright owners will have no trouble getting GitHub to (at least) listen to their complaints.

He said he also tweeted at them.

I'm only a GitHub user here, but I believe GitHub to be very transparent on copyright issues. They post the DMCA takedown notices they receive[1] (and the counter notices as well; in a Git repo, of course!) — this was on HN[2] back when Flat UI received a DMCA takedown notice[3]. There's also another page listing the policy itself[4]. As other users have noted however, the repo linked to in the article reads “Access to this repository has been disabled by GitHub staff due to excessive use of resources, in violation of our Terms of Service.”

Given the other posts, it seems there might just be some confusion that needs clearing up; for that, we'll have to see if our blogger posts anything more.

[1]: https://github.com/github/dmca

[2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5342360

[3]: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2013-03-06-LayerV...

[4]: https://help.github.com/articles/dmca-takedown

Why not BitBucket then? Github is nice, but it's not the end-all of hosting solutions.

Yes. I use BitBucket because it allows free private repositories. No problems at all.

I like Unfuddle. I'd put more stuff there, but nobody would see it if I did. For many people it's like if code isn't on GitHub it doesn't exist.

He doesn't even have to use bitbucket, it sounds like he can just create another github project. I think he's not asking for alternatives though, just explaining the situation and calling attention to it.

I am also a bug fan of bitbucket, I got three groups on it, using it unlimited mode, since they are research/education related (emails).

I use BitBucket for private repos and GitHub for public-facing resume stuff. Generally works best.

The copyright claim seems unsupportable in the first place. As far as I understand, a simple list of things that fit in a category does not meet the minimum originality requirement. See: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_v._Rural

It also seems like it would be trivially easy to compile a similar list from linkedin.

Data isn't copyrightable. The format is, but the data itself isn't. Yes, it would be nice to sanitize a list. And yes it would be nice to not actually use real names with real addresses. But no copyright violation here.

Sadly there in lies the problem of using a third party, you are at the mercy of their legal department. The facts don't always matter.

Another unfortunate example of the necessities of contributor agreements.

Another unfortunate example of the necessities of contributor agreements.

Uh, no. This is an example of needing to take care, and fully understand what is going into each commit.

The OP got a little sloppy (which happens), and is now praying the price for it. Hopefully it can all get resolved soon and everyone can get back to work.

Whoever gave him the file might also share some of the blame.

There is a big difference in submitting an example that provokes a bug, and publishing that example.

If an audio player crashes when opening a file with the latest Miley Cyrus hit, then that specific file is useful to reproduce the bug, but it doesn't mean that it can be redistributed further.

The same is with any personally identifiable information - if you have obtained a list of people names/emails/adresses, it doesn't automatically mean that it's okay for you to publish that list.

> Hopefully it can all get resolved soon and everyone can get back to work.

If we wanted everyone to get back to work, we wouldn't be browsing HN.

I would assume contributor agreements would be very important for issues like this if they were ever to go to court. But I doubt it would have been acknowledged by GitHub in their response to the complaint.

Another example of someone abusing copyright. This person is using copyright as a means to shut down someone else's work, even though this is clearly not a copyright issue. Something needs to be done about bogus copyright claims that are really about censoring someone else. There should be penalties for issuing bad copyright claims. That is simply not working.

Why doesn't GitHub make it easier to research or attach an open source license to code?

I think they make this website to help project owner to pick licenses http://choosealicense.com/

When you create a new repo it allows you to automatically pick a license (and even a initialise a default .gitignore file).

Ah, ok... I didn't know they had a license picker. Cool!

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