Counter-claim is for after you have removed the content. I am not going to remove the content just because a fuzzy DMCA was issued. Apparently there are no options besides taking it offline or going into a legal battle
This text is a bit misleading - in step two, you aren't promising that you will remove the content, you're simply listing the things that GitHub removed that you'd like to see reinstated.
The meaning of the counter-claim is not, "I agree, I removed the stuff, sorry", the meaning is, "I disagree, put the stuff back up. If you don't like it, take me to court."
By filing a counter claim you aren't really starting a legal battle, you're giving them 10 days to start a real legal battle by going to a court. Your content is already offline. File a counter claim and it will be back up in a week and a half.
| you're giving them 10 days to start a real
| legal battle by going to a court
To be clear, that's 10 days before the content goes back up to take you to court to prevent it from going back up. Nothing stops them from suing you over it after the content is restored.
Just out of curiosity. Is there a time limit of how long they can sue for after it's restored?
Could they wait for you to get a huge user base or revenue and then strike to get the most out of you or is there protection against that?
I don't see myself ever creating anything that would get taken down but I imagine most people don't when it happens to them.
Any time I hear about DMCA it seems so very one sided that there is just about no recourse.
Well, they can sue you at any time. They don't really need to issue a DMCA notice first. The issue is that:
1) Most of the time they don't know your real identity from your (e.g.) YouTube username. IIRC, you have to use your real name or contact information when filing a counter-notice.
2) If they sue you, the content stays up until they can convince the judge to order it to be taken down.
The point of the DMCA was to allow for things to be taken down quickly, and then sorted out in court later if need be. The content is taken down quickly. If you push back (counter-notice), then the (claimed) content owner has 10-14 days to start court proceedings to keep it down; otherwise, it goes back up. None of this precludes a suit being filed at any point.
The real issue with this process is that there is little relief for negligence in filing DMCA notices. All you have to do is have a good-faith belief that you are the content owner, and this violates your rights. So acting like you're ignorant of the law is actually a defence against being held accountable for filing a bogus notice.
If bogus DMCA notices were punished more often, and people were required to consult a lawyer before firing at the hip (e.g. people that don't understand copyright law, and just say, "I don't like X take it down! DMCA!"), then maybe it would be working better.
I think you are mis-reading the page. To file the counter notification, you have to provide the link to the content that was already removed by github. They are not telling you that you have to remove the content, then provide a link proving that you removed the content.
No, github already removed access to the public... you have to file the counter-claim for github to put it back. Github will notify the original party of the counter-claim, then if they want it down permanently, they have to take you to court.
Absolutely. Pushing to DMCA'd repos might actually be necessary in some cases, and if this is abused github may be forced to disable this for everybody. Still, pretty neat; thanks for trying it out!
