11. Content Removal Policies - DMCA Takedown Policy
This document outlines GitHub's policy regarding the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). It explains the DMCA's purpose, how takedown notices and counter-notices work, and GitHub's procedures for handling copyright infringement claims, including those involving forks and circumvention technology. The policy aims to demystify the law for both rights-holders and users.
GitHub DMCA Takedown Policy
In this article
A. How Does This Actually Work?
B. What About Forks? (or What's a Fork?)
C. What about Circumvention Claims?
D. What If I Inadvertently Missed the Window to Make Changes?
Welcome to GitHub's Guide to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, commonly known as the "DMCA." This page is not meant as a comprehensive primer to the statute. However, if you've received a DMCA takedown notice targeting content you've posted on GitHub or if you're a rights-holder looking to issue such a notice, this page will hopefully help to demystify the law a bit as well as our policies for complying with it.
(If you just want to submit a notice, you can skip to "G. Submitting Notices.")
As with all legal matters, it is always best to consult with a professional about your specific questions or situation. We strongly encourage you to do so before taking any action that might impact your rights. This guide isn't legal advice and shouldn't be taken as such.
What Is the DMCA?
In order to understand the DMCA and some of the policy lines it draws, it's perhaps helpful to consider life before it was enacted.
The DMCA provides a safe harbor for service providers that host user-generated content. Since even a single claim of copyright infringement can carry statutory damages of up to $150,000, the possibility of being held liable for user-generated content could be very harmful for service providers. With potential damages multiplied across millions of users, cloud-computing and user-generated content sites like YouTube, Facebook, or GitHub probably never would have existed without the DMCA (or at least not without passing some of that cost downstream to their users).
The DMCA addresses this issue by creating a copyright liability safe harbor for internet service providers hosting allegedly infringing user-generated content. Essentially, so long as a service provider follows the DMCA's notice-and-takedown rules, it won't be liable for copyright infringement based on user-generated content. Because of this, it is important for GitHub to maintain its DMCA safe-harbor status.
The DMCA also prohibits the circumvention of technical measures that effectively control access to works protected by copyright.
DMCA Notices In a Nutshell
The DMCA provides two simple, straightforward procedures that all GitHub users should know about: (i) a takedown-notice procedure for copyright holders to request that content be removed; and (ii) a counter-notice procedure for users to get content re-enabled when content is taken down by mistake or misidentification.
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