Github caves in to Whatsapp's Legal Assault | Hacker News Reader

Github caves in to Whatsapp's Legal Assault

12 pointslexaude6 comments

Github appears to have disabled access to a number of repositories in response to a DMCA takedown by Whatsapp's general counsel in February 2014. These repositories appear to contain code that allows developers to create apps that can communicate with the official whatsapp client. The biggest target of this takedown is Tarek Galak's Open Whatsapp platform. http://openwhatsapp.org/

Take a look at the takedown notice here - https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-02-12-WhatsApp.md

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Is Github expected to take on personal liability for every repository it hosts, and provide free legal representation for their owners in court? I don't know if that's a winning business. Following the DMCA is probably a smarter move, which means taking down the repositories when a claim is filed, and restoring them 10 business days after a counternotice is filed.

Several of those counternotices were filed at the very end of last month, and the 10 business days have not yet elapsed. Github can't put them back online early unless it wants to lose the liability protection.

It did sound like I was criticising Github but that wasn't what I intended. Github actually came out looking good because like Google, its done a good job posting a copy of all takedown notices. In fact, looks like Github put all the repos back online again!!

I guess that time was going to come eventually. Tarek Galak's Open Whatsapp was a great project for the Nokia N9 initially. A great mobile platform that had 0 support, but with a strong community (over at maemo.org) that reverse engineered WhatsApp.

And they're back in business :)

Yeah, but that's how the DMCA works.

If these users want to challenge the takedown notice they can, and my guess is that Github would probably put the content back up and it would be up to WhatsApp to take the next step if they want to.

And they did!

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