Open Sauce depository Github is being hit in a crossfire between porn companies and torrent sites.
Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to Google by the porn companies have taken down dozens of legitimate GitHub URLs.
GitHub support pages, entire code repositories, and user profile pages have all been purged from Google and Tomasz Janczuk, a former Microsoft employee, had part of his GitHub repository removed from Google’s search results by a company representing Adam & Eve, a porn production company.
Janczuk said that removing GitHub pages from Google’s search results could harm the open source software community by reducing its visibility online.
Apparently Adam&Eve thought that Janczuk’s URL, “https://github.com/tjanczuk/edge,” was apparently too close to The Edge, a 2001 flick made by the company.
Of course it is not just the porn companies doing this. Other GitHub pages have been taken down by the music companies for similar reasons.
All of it is because the content groups are using the dumbest method to find P2P content – that of URLs rather than actually checking if the site infringes their copyright.
GitHub does have a DMCA policy requires that users be notified of complaints levied against them and given time to correct the issue. Google handles its 345 million yearly takedowns nearly automatically .
Nicky Case, developer of Nothing to Hide, an open source indie game was targetted by Total Wipes in September for having the word “hide” in its GitHub URL, in an email. In the end however his software was not taken down from Google’s search results.
But he said that if his GitHub repository was less famous, maybe it wouldn’t have gone as well.
