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Comment by marshray | Hacker News Reader

Help me, I'm trying to get my head around this.

You developed a file sharing system that allows anyone to obtain the full contents of a file by simply knowing its hash?

Then when developers make tools to allow using this for simple cross-account file transfer you send DMCA takedown notices, claiming you are the rightful copyright holder of their code, to places like GitHub?

You seem to equate other file transfer services with "illegal file sharing".

Did you ever consider the possibility that someone could steal the contents of another person's file by knowing the hash of it? Sometimes hashes are public info and the file contents are not.

Or am I not understanding what just happened here?

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No DMCA takedown requests were sent to GitHub. We simply nicely asked the author of Dropship to take down the link and he fully understood our position and took the code down.

The only erroneous use of DMCA was when we attempted to take down the link on Dropbox, which was an entirely honest mistake.

"He requested that I not only remove the archive from Dropbox but delete my posts on Hacker News, which at that point included the fake DMCA takedown."

What you tried to do there is censor and resorted to fake legal repercussions. You can brush it aside saying that it was a mistake but it is still uncool for a corporation to do that to an individual.

I see. So the comment on the razorfast.com site:

I forked Dropship, just in case, and my GitHub repo of it was deleted. I was not notified of this. NOT happy with DropBox, and ESPECIALLY not happy with GitHub.

Is perhaps not accurate then.

Since the original dropship repo mentioned on razorfast is still available (and has a pull request waiting), and the comment didn't really contain any context, I wouldn't give it much weight yet.

I'm pretty sure sending fake DMCA requests is illegal, and it doesn't matter if it's a mistake.

It's illegal only if it was intentional. A mistakenly sent DMCA request is okay, as long as the sender follows up with a disregard notice.

Was it?

There were no takedown requests. The whole discussion is moot.

but what he's saying is he sent a notice of a DMCA takedown, not an actual takedown request.

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