WhatsApp issued takedown against alternative clients a week before acquisition

I wouldn't read too much into this. As part of their purchase agreement WhatsApp likely needed to say that they had been diligent in maintaining and defending their copyrights and trademark. That's pretty standard in a financing, so I'd imagine it's a standard part of M&A deals. It probably turned up during due diligence that they had some "cleanup" to take care of in order to not be lying when they made that representation.

I own one of the affected repositories, and submitted the original link to HN the moment I got an email notification about it from Github [1]. It&#x27;s a shame we didn&#x27;t get the discussion going earlier.<p>IANAL, but what the hell does a security POC (and an unofficial API derived from it) have to do copyrights? On what grounds did a repo get chosen for takedown? Is it the &quot;whatsapp&quot; in the name? What about a simple &quot;x.whatsapp.net&quot; connection string in the code? Is that infringement?<p>Either way, shitty move by WhatsApp.<p>[1] - <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7230041" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=7230041</a>

Interesting. Trademark law is probably pretty strong against repositories named &quot;WhatsApp&quot; or something very similar. Using the logo without permission as well.<p>Describing a project as &quot;working with WhatsApp&quot; would probably not be an actionable trademark infringement. Code that works with the WhatsApp API is almost certainly not &quot;infringing&quot;, unless there&#x27;s some &quot;encryption&quot; going on.<p>Unfortunately the DMCA takedown rules are such that Internet providers such as Github have basically no direct recourse and refusing to comply is not an option. Additionally, complainants don&#x27;t have to prove much of anything to issue a takedown notice to a service provider. This is a seriously broken part of copyright law, IMO.

Wireshark dissector plugin? taken down? I haven&#x27;t really followed wireshark goings-on in a while, but wow... just wow... I don&#x27;t think i&#x27;ve seen this before:<p><a href="https://github.com/davidgfnet/wireshark-whatsapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidgfnet&#x2F;wireshark-whatsapp</a><p>My apologies for the bile, but I can&#x27;t help but call out my reactions to this news...<p>1. facebook (you: I expected this from, you we&#x27;re already #1 on this s#17list) 2. whatsapp (sell-out!) 3. github (highly disappointed watching you just lay down and immediately comply shutting down these repositories)<p>I&#x27;m considering moving all my code off of github over this...

With the poor, let&#x27;s say terrible, security posture WhatsApp always had, this is really not the way to communicate the message that they care and want their software to be scrutinized. Open implementations are a great help to any reverse engineer trying to figure out the mess that is their protocol.<p>This is exactly what triggers full disclosure.

I own 3 of the affected repos:<p>Yowsup <a href="https://github.com/tgalal/yowsup" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tgalal&#x2F;yowsup</a> MIT License<p>It is a library that implements WhatsApp&#x27;s protocol. It is built on community effort of reverse engineering WhatsApp&#x27;s protocol. I created this in first place to bring WhatsApp on an unsupported platform (Nokia N9&#x2F; meego platform)<p>Wazapp <a href="https://github.com/tgalal/wazapp" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tgalal&#x2F;wazapp</a> GPLv2 License<p>This is a UI frontend to Yowsup for Nokia N9. Nokia N9 is the only smartphone produced by Nokia which never got WhatsApp support. I created this client because I wanted to use WhatsApp on my Nokia N9. The code is totally decoupled from Yowsup, and does not use WhatsApp in its name. You can see its icon here <a href="http://everythingn9.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/05/wazapp.png" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;everythingn9.com&#x2F;wp-content&#x2F;uploads&#x2F;2012&#x2F;05&#x2F;wazapp.pn...</a> which for me looks different enough from official client&#x27;s icon.<p>OpenWA <a href="https://github.com/tgalal/OpenWhatsappBB10" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;tgalal&#x2F;OpenWhatsappBB10</a> GPLv3 License<p>This is also a frontend to Yowsup, but for Blackberry 10. It is a little bit similar case as Wazapp. I created this for BB10 when WhatsApp initially said they&#x27;re not supporting that platform. Again, this is decoupled from Yowsup, has same icon as Wazapp. Its name though on Github is OpenWhatsappB10, as a project name. However, the real app name is OpenWA. Perhaps a rename of the repository would be sufficient ?

That is <i>not</i> a DMCA takedown request. It is merely a takedown request. The person to whom it was sent has no obligation to comply.

Interesting to see how the priorities beginning to shift once somebody gets ready to make a deal with the devil.

&gt; This continues to cause significant harm to WhatsApp.<p>$16bn says otherwise.

IANAL, but these claims can&#x27;t last. To the extent those projects are using WhatsApp&#x27;s trademarks or copyrighted logos, they can stop infringing by renaming and removing the logos. There might be a &quot;hacking&quot; claim against users who use that software to access WhatsApp&#x27;s servers, but not copyright (assuming WhatsApp doesn&#x27;t claim copyright over messages sent through the aervice), of unknown validity, and probably not enforceable against a site which merely hosts code to do so. I think.

It looks like Github has pulled a bunch of the repos, including the ones that don&#x27;t even have &quot;WhatsApp&quot; in their names.<p>Is this because they had something like &quot;compatible with WhatsApp&quot; in their descriptions?<p>If I were repository owners and&#x2F;or paying customer of Github, I would not be OK with this.

People really liked this one: <a href="https://github.com/davidgfnet/whatsapp-purple" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;davidgfnet&#x2F;whatsapp-purple</a><p>Starred 419 times.

&gt; unauthorized use of WhatsApp APIs<p>Does that actually have anything to do with copyright or trademark, or are they just very takedown-happy lawyers?

I&#x27;ve enjoyed looking through that Github repository. Lots of snarky comments in the commit log about requests from Sony.

This is the HTML version: <a href="https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2014-02-12-WhatsApp.md" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;github.com&#x2F;github&#x2F;dmca&#x2F;blob&#x2F;master&#x2F;2014-02-12-WhatsA...</a>

Interesting, so what would happen if I were to upload a copy of these repos under a new name? (not that I was going to)

666 github stars for the repo :)

wtf. i had no idea this could be done to open source code.

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