Not the first time they've taken down Github repos, some with a legal basis (partial problem text, though Fair Use might overrule that if the cases ever made it to court), others with no involvement at all (<a href="https://github.com/egfx/React-Leaderboard" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/egfx/React-Leaderboard</a> still hasn't been restored, for example)<p>More information about previous DMCA abuse here: <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29239594" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29239594</a><p>Personally, I would not trust a company this unethical to certify anything. Their excuse seems to be "we're using an external service" but they chose that external service and are fully responsible for these takedowns in their name.
Hello again, Vivek, founder/CEO here. In the interest of moving swiftly, here are the actions we are going to take:<p>(1) We have withdrawn the DMCA notice for sympy; Sent a note to senior leadership in Github to act on this quickly.<p>(2) We have stopped the whole DMCA process for now and working on internal guidelines of what constitutes a real violation so that these kind of incidents don't happen. We are going to do this in-house<p>(3) We are going to donate $25k to the sympy project.<p>As a company we take a lot of pride in helping developers and it sucks to see this. I'm extremely sorry for what happened here.
This same DMCA company (WorthIT Solutions) previously tried to DMCA the php docs range function page on behalf of HackerRank [0]. Pretty crazy.<p>[0]: <a href="https://www.mail-archive.com/php-webmaster@lists.php.net/msg14947.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.mail-archive.com/php-webmaster@lists.php.net/msg...</a>
<a href="https://docs.sympy.org/" rel="nofollow">https://docs.sympy.org/</a> is down …seems like a lame move for a programming-oriented company.<p>The takedown message is here – <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-15-hackerrank.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-1...</a><p>And the offending page is archived here, I wonder what part they wanted removed – <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.sympy.org/latest/modules/solvers/solvers.html" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.symp...</a>
What scares me the most about this story is how easily it could've been a small software shop running their entire operations on GitHub getting DCMA'd without any merit, and just losing access to an important repo within 24 hours. And imagine they don't know about Hacker News. Or they posted something which didn't get enough upvotes for the offending company to respond and resolve it quickly.<p>As a software developer, I've surrendered so much autonomy for the sake of convenience. When it works 99% of the time, things are awesome. But god forbid you are the 1%, cause there is usually no talking to real people to get support. The only recourse is shouting about it on Twitter/HN and <i>hope</i> someone notices, thereby leaving everything to chance - that just makes me sad to my core.
I'm happy that this is now on the front page because that's how fraudulent DMCA requests get fixed :)<p>The goodwill lost will now surely exceed the money they saved by not doing proper due diligence. I'm optimistic that HackerRank won't make the same mistake again and other companies might take notice, too.
Hello, I'm Vivek, founder/CEO of HackerRank. Our intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments. This was definitely an unintended consequence. We are looking into it ASAP and also going to do an RCA to ensure this doesn't happen again.<p>Sorry, everyone!<p>EDIT: update here <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085</a>
I apologize in advance for the profanity. This really pissed me off.<p>FUCK you HackerRank, for even entertaining the notion of litigating open source projects at scale for no good reason.<p>FUCK you for taking down the the documentation for a harmless open source symbolic mathematics engine without any justification that I can see.<p>What content of your shitty ranking company could SymPy possibly have infringed on?<p>Also an honorable FUCK you to GitHub for your DMCA policy to take down the repository without even a standby period (perhaps with a warning?).<p>And FUCK the internet in 2022 for its bureaucratic and corporate spirit.<p>And FUCK me for not having the steel to just take my code off of GitHub. I am part of the problem.
Many people doesn't seem to understand what pain individuals undergo when their content is taken offline by Google or Github due to a fake DMCA notice.<p>They would have built something over years and one morning entire thing is taken offline due to a fake DMCA notice. Then they have to issue a counter notice with all its legal implications and it also exposes all your private information including full address, name and phone number(in a wrong country, you become target of thieves as well). Then it takes almost a month before content is restored.<p>How can an individual fight this? How can you make companies misusing DMCA pay for it?
Unpopular opinion: FOSS projects shouldn't bother hosting under US jurisdiction. There's absolutely no upside for a nonprofit, and our supercharged lawfare culture causes endless headaches for everyone -- even the most <i>innocent</i> software in the whole world, like a symbolic algebra library.<p>It's so depressing to see well-meaning philanthropy apathetically trampled by thugs in suits.
After the youtube-dl incident, Nat Friedman (then-CEO) tweeted: <a href="https://mobile.twitter.com/natfriedman/status/1328365679473426432" rel="nofollow">https://mobile.twitter.com/natfriedman/status/13283656794734...</a><p>> We are taking a stand for developers and have reinstated the youtube-dl repo. Section 1201 of the DMCA is broken and needs to be fixed. Developers should have the freedom to tinker. That's how you get great tools like youtube-dl.<p>Now they are deleting obviously-compliant docs from nonsensical requests. I guess the "stand" went away with Friedman...
Wow. I'm actively in the market for this service for something but will never do business with HackerRank, as they continued to use the same horrible abusive DMCA agent after they did this back in January. Once is "we made a bad choice in vendor", twice is we are horrible people ourselves.
"Someone has illegally copied our client's technical exams questions and answers from their official website <a href="https://www.hackerrank.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackerrank.com/</a> and uploaded them on their platform without permission."<p>WorthIT is worthless.
<a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-19-hackerrank.md" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2022/04/2022-04-1...</a><p>and still more DMCA notices going in since this post has been up, Looks like they still haven't learnt there lesson despite what they have said in this thread
I don't remember all the details, but one time at "a very large US Bank", a surveillance contractor saw "@largebank.com" email addresses in the public archives of an apache listserv and issued some type of takedown.<p>Apache responded by blocking all access from the bank's IPs including mirrors/other critical stuff...oops!
I hope there's some real consequence of DMCA abuse like this. I hope companies would announce HackerRank boycott in hiring process. There are better alternatives tbh
HackeRank sends pretty nasty DMCA requests.<p>I recently received one from a Pakistani company hired by HackerRank. The material in question was a simple blog entry on a well known programming problem and its solution. The problem is DMCA doesn't provide any way to fight these fake requests and Google simply removes the content until you send a counter notification and wait for over 2 weeks.<p>DMCA should have a provision that if a company is misusing DMCA at large-scale, their requests should go through additional validation.
> I swear, under penalty of perjury, that the information in the notification is accurate and that I am the copyright owner or am authorized to act on behalf of the owner of an exclusive right that is allegedly infringed.<p>Too bad these perjery-as-a-service companies never get held to account.
What is the penalty for a clearly wrong DMCA request? Does the company have any responsibility to correct their mistake? Or can I just go spamming requests to take down content all over the internet that I don't like?
As soon as the online coding challenge sites started being used for tech interviews, they got into the business of trying to prevent algo solutions from being shared.<p>The real answer: don't do it, its not possible. You may have made some kind of contractual guarantee that you would prevent sharing of solutions, but that is your problem. This is stupid and silly and I will not be using hackerrank anymore.
GitHub is partially responsible here too. It seems the action is remove first ask questions later. Why can’t there be more protection? Innocent until proven guilty, anyone?
From the posted DMCA notice:<p>> Allegedly Infringing Material Location Links:<p>“Allegedly”? Does this mean even the lawyers are not sure whether the material is infringing upon their client’s content or not?
Hackerrank filed a DMCA notice against my blog because of a graph search example I had a written and I had 24 hours to full delete it or my blog would be deleted.<p>As an individual this is so frustrating and if you mission is to support developers Vivek, I'm one developer that had quite the opposite experience.<p>I frankly am very frustrated by your company and you hiring folks to shakedown developers writing poen blogs or docs. If any company tries to get me to do a hackerrank interview to join I'm going to decline.<p><a href="https://ravinkumar.com/" rel="nofollow">https://ravinkumar.com/</a>
"This repository is currently disabled due to a DMCA takedown _notice_."<p>This is a disgrace
How can something be taken down by nothing more than a notice?<p>What if the next one isn't as big as a project as sympy?<p>DMCA requests are absolutely broken
What was the exact part DMCA'ed? Was it documentation?<p>I am curious also here about opensource. What was the license if any?<p>Also, which license allows you to copy (and modify) for your own use, whether personal or not to reproduce?
It seams that HackerRank has about 27 DMCA take-downs on GitHub. See <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/search?q=HackerRank" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/github/dmca/search?q=HackerRank</a>
I wish I have enough time to host a dedicated hackerrank (among other such business model companies) solutions website in a jurisdiction that doesn't care for dmca at all.<p>This entire business model is shitty if it involves taking down the solutions for problems. None of this is novel and shouldn't be protected by anything (copyright or patents).
They are happy to accept any benefits that come from the "external service" operating on their behalf.<p>If the "external service" wins some money or closes down some competition, do they give it back and say "look that was an external service, nothing to do with us"?
If you happened to create an account for these shitbirds, here's a handy link to delete it: <a href="https://www.hackerrank.com/settings/account" rel="nofollow">https://www.hackerrank.com/settings/account</a>
Stephen Wolfram is probably happy today. It's a shame an awesome project like SymPy can be nuked by some bogus perjury-riddled spam notice just like this.