Hacker News Reader

Comment by mehlmao | Hacker News Reader

I stopped using Audacity and swore to never use a MuseScore product again after their developers threatened a GitHub contributor who made a crawler with deportation and torture.

> "Upon further investigation, it became clear that Wenzheng Tang is a Chinese national, but not resident in China. As a guest in his current country, his residency status is predicated on a number of conditions, one of which is not violating the law.

> "If found in violation of laws, residency may be revoked and he may be deported to his home country.

> "This becomes even further complicated given another repo of his - Fuck 学习强国, which is highly critical of the Chinese government. Were he deported to China, who knows how he may be received."

See 'MuseScore/Audacity employee theatening to destroy a Chinese developer's life' (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27881539)

View on HN

I find it pretty distasteful that they scrubbed their comments (thankfully Archive picked them up https://web.archive.org/web/20210719115639if_/https://github...), deleted their GitHub, and are still employed as the Director of Strategy at Muse Group.

I can't find any examples where Daniel Ray, the author of these comments, apologised or acknowledged these. They simply scrubbed them, and their employer continued to employ them.

Disgusting, if I was associated with Audacity, Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, audio.com, StaffPad, MuseClass or ToneBridge - I'd be pretty revolted by discovering this now, after-the-fact.

That link seems to show a very different story though? What they said was that they _hadn't_ requested a takedown for those reasons

"Simply put, the actual process of requesting the take down and proving violation would have severe implication on Wenzheng Tang, so I have hesitated in the hopes he would simply choose to take it down himself."

"So, both repositories remain up, for now, not because we are powerless to take it down... it is that the process of exercising this power could very literally ruin the actual life of another person."

"It'd be a shame if.. You had an accident.."

Thanks for bringing this to light. That is the most disgusting behavior I have ever seen from copyright people.

Nothing is being brought to light. The comment was not well considered but it was so obviously not a threat either.

Some folk took the comment and decided to hyper sensationalise it. In truth, what the Muse guy was trying to say was that he wanted the offending user to see reason and stop hosting software that allowed users to get free access to paid content. His appeal was that is was pointless to risk legal action and he was right. Incidentally, they were well within their rights to pursue legal action. They cannot permit a backdoor to licensed content to exist.

Also worth mentioning that after this incident, they never did pursue legal action - so they obviously found some quiet solution instead. Of course that ruins a good story. God people love outrage so much, they are just unable to see the boring reality of things.

Bullshit. What they did is called veiled threat of violence. They implicitly threatened to sue him, an act that threatens his legal permanence in the US if convicted. They thought far enough about the consequences of their actions that they reminded him of the possibility of being arrested, tortured and disappeared in China for wrongthink if deported.

I really don't give a shit if he infringed a million copyrights. Not a single person on this earth deserves that fate, especially not over copyright infringement. That's seriously disgusting.

Ah, more of this bullshit. I think this is about 90% hyperbole.

They asked some kid to stop creating systems that circumvent their licensing deals and he wouldn't do it. Then one of the employees appealed directly, using clumsy reasoning, and then loads of people pretended it was a threat and went on an outrage spree.

So tedious and dumb.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com