This. Github is acting like the knight in shining armor, but they really didn't do anything except respond to the backlash their complicit no-questions-asked removal caused.
On the contrary, they’re doing a lot, including establishing a $1M legal defense fund for developers and a technical team to review the validity of anti-circumvention DMCA notices. It seems like they’re doing a lot more than just paying lip service to EFF / developer freedom, and they should be commended for it.
They’re correcting a wrong because their reputation took a big hit in the dev community. Now there’s big talk of the dangers of not self-hosting your repo and the monoculture of using GitHub.
Although it probably has good intent, this is largely PR.
Being a rube isn't a great hobby either, that's why "fool me once ..." is a famous saying. As are the various versions of "who benefits?".
Pretty decent rules of thumb.
And at a higher level ... who cares if they did it maliciously or because they "panicked", you can't ever know that anyway and either one means you can predict what they will do in similar situations.
This isn't the first frivolous DMCA request GitHub complied with. A company owned by one of the largest tech companies in the world doesn't need to "panic" about something like this.
After Nat's cynically duplicitous comments and actions, it's hard to view this as anything other than PR. A $1 million expense is not a big advertising expense for github. It was a $7.5 billion sale. Microsoft spend 0.013% of that on this PR piece.
I can't imagine the fallout from this didn't wipe several times that off of github's valuation.
If github had done this before the EFF letter, it would have been something else. With the EFF letter, they have zero liability to reinstating the repo, and are borderline legally required to do so.
