github announced About creating a service to provide free legal assistance to developers of open software, unreasonably accused of Violation 1201 DMCA articles, which prohibits bypassing technical protection measures, such as DRM. The work of the service will be supervised by lawyers from the Stanford Law School, and financing is provided by the new Developer Defense Fund Foundation, to work a million dollars.
funds will be spent for hiring staff for research and raising awareness in the field of copyright law in the US Digital Epoch (DMCA), as well as providing legal advice accused of DMCA violations and training lawyers and students accompaniment programmers in of this area. It is noted that obtaining the requirements for eliminating DMCA violations may result in complex legal problems, on the solution of which the developers have no time and resources, and even if the requirement is unreasonable, the developer is easier to accept the removal of the repository than to get involved in the fight.
The established service will assume legal expertise and consulting developers in this area. In addition to the expert assessment of the legitimacy of the DMCA request, GitHub employees, the developer
will be able to obtain fully independent legal support, acting in the interests of the community.
Recall that in the footsteps of the last incident with the blocking of the Youtube-DL GitHub changed the processing of blocking requirements. Practice introduced mandatory review by legal and technical experts of each blocking requirement based on 1201 DMCA articles. In the absence of explicit evidence of illegal protection, the blocking is not made, and for reasonable claims, a preliminary notification of the developer has been introduced with the provision of time to challenge the claim or make a correction in the repository. Developers of blocked repositories are given the opportunity to export Issues, PRs and other data that are not containing illegal content, and the highest priority will be assigned to requests to the blocking support service due to DMCA.