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Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Say what you will about Github and Microsoft, this was a classy move. A million dollars is a million dollars. "Putting your money where your mouth is".

"Nonetheless, developers who want to push back against unwarranted takedowns may face the risk of taking on personal liability and legal defense costs. To help them, GitHub will establish and donate $1M to a developer defense fund to help protect open source developers on GitHub from unwarranted DMCA Section 1201 takedown claims. We will immediately begin working with other members of the community to set up this fund and take other measures to collectively protect developers and safeguard developer collaboration."

Thanks Microsoft/Github.

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> GitHub will establish and donate $1M

What is really needed is a "counter-DCMA troll." So far as I understand DCMA, legal fees can be collected for a successful counter-claim.

With the rife DCMA fraud these days, someone could make a pretty penny. DCMA has provisions for claim fraud, it simply requires attorneys to creatively weaponize it (which unfortunately doesn't apply to YouTube, because their process is not DCMA/legal).

As I understand it, DMCA claim fraud requires legally proving bad faith, which is a quite high bar to clear.

There are no provisions for negligence (which is what most of these claims probably amount to - you could even make a good argument for depraved indifference, but there are no provisions for that either) or mistakes, it has to be intentionally fraudulent. Even if it was a completely BS takedown, you're left with proving malice rather than error.

> "Even if it was a completely BS takedown, you're left with proving malice rather than error."

True, but making the same "errors" over and over and over again without regard for the consequences starts to smell fishy after a while, almost like intimidation or a protection racket.

I wonder how much MS funds the RIAA as a member of it.

Dues are $2500/y if you have revenues of $1-5MM, $5000/y if you have revenues of $5-15MM, and "contact us" beyond that: https://www.riaa.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/RIAA_ApplyFo...

Since one presumes that Microsoft does not sell much music (didn't they shut down their music store a few years ago?), I can't imagine they've negotiated dues that scale linearly on Microsoft's total revenue - so, in fact, I'd expect that $1M is well beyond their RIAA dues.

Now, it's possible that MS is contributing money other than dues to the RIAA, but you can bound that a bit from their Form 990: https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/131... For 2017, they got under $100K in "contributions and grants" and $29MM in "program service revenue," which is later determined to be dues. They received no other significant revenue. So no donor could have possibly given them more than $100K.

(... also, why did the RIAA give $4K to the Kenai River Sportfishing Association?)

Unfortunately it seems difficult to discover how long they’ve been a member: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902985 They could theoretically have donated $2MM at $50K a year if they had joined back around the time when Bill Gates was railing about ‘theft’ of his BASIC (and others were replacing it with a superior ‘@copyleft all wrongs reserved’ one) ~45 year ago.

(Edit: of course cash is only one form of value.)

I just find it quite ironic that their site is running WordPress, a "free and open-source content management system".

Why? They're complying with the license. It shouldn't be surprising to see them taking advantage of copyright law when it benefits them, then turning around and taking advantage of copyright law them it benefits them. It's quite a bit more benign than Disney making movies off of public-domain stories while lobbying to keep Mickey Mouse under copyright, since they didn't even lobby for it. The WordPress developers just gave them the code for free.

Free and open-source software isn't subversive. It's innovative, which isn't the same thing. It's certainly a new model, but the way you get a GPL violation removed from GitHub is with a DMCA takedown notice. Free and open-source software is a different and nicer use of the copyright system, but it's all still the same system at the end of the day.

And now that they've had a couple decades to get over their discomfort and they've realized that there's nothing subversive there, people who love copyright are totally fine with free and open-source software, because it furthers their goal of making money.

If MS is a member of RIAA they should consider putting forward a motion to close it down or at very least leave it.

Absolutely. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24902631

This is a great first step. We need to ramp up the pressure.

The newish Microsoft seems to be more understanding of this sort of thing with supporting Linux with Office and giving Windows 10 away for free.

This would instantly improve their reputation among the entire developer community. DMCA is an abusive mess that is constantly used to attack legitimate open-source work, research, or simply just by bad actors to take down literally anything they want from the internet.

The big websites like Reddit don't care about legitimacy, it's all automated agreement, I've seen entire subreddits taken down due to fake DMCA requests by someone who didn't like what the subreddit was about (And it was too small of a place for it to make enough noise to matter to anyone, nor did anyone try or know how to try). We hear small samples of it here on HN but who knows the amount of abusive and unwarranted DMCA notices that you never hear about.

They are creating a fund that they control to take the place of EFF and avoid future stand-offs.

Is replacing EFF that easy?

Honestly asking.

You're asking me? I don't know, but Microsoft clearly thinks $1 mil is enough for their users' needs.

> A million dollars is a million dollars.

Not if you are a company worth $1.6 trillion dollars.

But that $1 million dollars probably bought them a lot more in free press.

To put it into perspective, it would be like someone worth $1.6 million giving a homeless person $1, filming it, putting it on youtube and profiting off of it.

> Thanks Microsoft/Github.

Is this real?

Edit: Of course the downvotes. Not sure if employees of microsoft or people working in microsoft shops or the quality of people HN has attracted as declined.

For people saying nonsense like "A million dollars is a million dollars even if the company is worth 100 trillion dollars."...

Do you think forcing someone who makes $100 million to pay $1 million in taxes is the same as forcing someone who makes $2 million to pay $1 million in taxes? $1 million is still $1 million right? I guess the concept of proportionality is foreign to many here?

The "love" for microsoft recently is interesting. Facebook should look into buying that kind of love.

Wow. No good deed goes unpunished, right?

> Not if you are a company worth $1.6 trillion dollars.

A million dollars is a million dollars even if the company is worth 100 trillion dollars.

Expected contribution to legal defense costs of developers - $0

Current contribution for legal defense costs of developers- $1 million

Ya but $1MM for a generic legal defense fund created and thus owned by GitHub (read: Microsoft) is pretty neutered. I’m sure their lawyers charge between $200-750/hr (pretty standard for a decent lawyer), so $1MM isn’t going to go very far. If they employ lawyers full time for this at 200-500k/yr, there won’t be many working on this team for very long.

Defending a medium complexity case against a deep picker (RIAA) will easy surpass that, and that’s just a single case.

The question is how can this be sustainable and not a trivial token?

Your metaphor is kind of silly, since it compares the EFF with the unhoused, but, playing along, it's more like someone worth 16 billion giving an unhoused person $10,000.

A million bucks is real money, EFF can do a lot of good with it. They're not going to buy a pack of chewing gum with it.

I'm old enough that I doubt anything will ever turn me around on Microsoft, it annoys me to no end that they bought Github. But by the same token, I'm big on the EFF, and I'm stoked that they scored some loot: I'll give Microsoft credit for that, but the only way I'm forgiving the company its past sins is if it liquidates the company and sets up a charitable fund for free software.

There's now a bulwark between developers and bad actors attempting to use Github and the legal framework against them. It is very probably that outside actual, valid legal justification, what the RIAA tried will never be tried again, thanks to the presence of that fund.

Put a price on that.

But the EFF was already there and already doing that work.

> Is this real?

I'm as amazed as you are.

> The "love" for microsoft recently is interesting.

The Corporatocracy has never been so polarizing.

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