FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

Porn Companies Are Going After GitHub

Anti-piracy services can't seem to tell the difference between cocks and code.

Porn production companies are currently engaged in a scorched earth copyright infringement campaign against torrenting sites with URLs containing specific keywords—say, "thrust" or "glob-watcher." GitHu​b, a popular site for coders that allows professionals and hobbyists to create open source software together, is getting caught in the crossfire.

Several Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) complaints filed to G​oogle by companies representing various porn companies in the last month alone have resulted in dozens of legitimate GitHub URLs being removed from the search engine's results, Tor​rentFreak first reported.

Advertisement

Among the offending URLs were GitHub support pages, entire code repositories, and user profile pages. Tomasz Janczuk, a former Microsoft employee, had part of his GitHub repository​ removed from Google's search results after a December 20th, 2014 DMCA compla​int by Takedown P​iracy LLC, a company representing Adam & Eve, a porn production company.

According to Janczuk, removing GitHub pages from Google's search results could harm the open source software community by reducing its visibility online.

"Removal of GitHub content or reduction of its visibility would have a substantial impact on companies or individuals participating in the open source model," Janczuk sad in an email, "since high visibility of [open source software] content is frequently part of a marketing strategy."

Janczuk's URL, "https://github.com/tja​nczuk/edge," was apparently too close to The E​dge, a 2001 movie made by Adam & Eve, for the company's liking.

Porn companies aren't alone in this practice, though a perusal of Google's tra​nsparency report reveals that the vast majority of DMCA complaints against GitHub in the last six months were filed by Takedown Piracy on behalf of a range of porn companies.

A num​ber of overreaching, keyword-based req​uests were also filed in 2014 by Total Wi​pes Music Group, an anti-piracy company representing small record labels, and resulted in legitimate GitHub pages being targeted, if not ultimately rem​oved.

Advertisement

an anti-piracy service flagged GitHub after finding pages with links to torrent sites

The requests filed by anti-piracy companies on behalf of porn producers mainly target torrenting site​s with GitHub thrown into the mix, which a representative of the company told us is a result of GitHub being permanently flagged in their system after finding repositories containing links to torrent sites. Legitimate URLs were then swept up. According to the company, the software issue has been corrected.

Total Wipes, on the other hand, appears to target sites indiscrimin​ately based on keywords, and with little rhyme or reason—from the Museum of Modern Art to Wikihow. We reached out to Total Wipes for comment, but did not receive a response.

GitHub is no stranger to receiving DMCA requests to remove copyrighted content—mostly code—from its site, and the company maintain​s a repository of every takedown notice it has received in the last four years.

Dozens of DMCA takedown requests are listed on GitHub's site from companies like Sony and Instagram, but none from the kinds of companies currently bombarding Google with takedown requests.

The likely reason for this is that GitHub's DMCA ​policy​ requires that users be notified of complaints levied against them and given time to correct the issue. Google, however, fields a huge number of DMCA takedown requests—345 million i​n 2014.

Though Google claims to address each request individually and "try [its​] best" to notify users of takedown requests, the GitHub users I contacted told me they were not notified by Google about the claims against them.

Advertisement

"I had no ideaat all—that itself is incredibly shocking, that I had no idea," said Nicky Case, developer of Nothing​ to Hide, an open source indie game targe​ted by Total Wipes in September for having the word "hide" in its GitHub​ URL, in an email. Nothing to Hide's page was not removed from Google's search results.

"If my GitHub [repository] was less famous, maybe it wouldn't have gone as well for me," Case continued. "Still, that's dangerous for a lot of budding coders and artists out there—I'm lucky."

Janczuk also had no clue that his GitHub page was being targeted by DMCA spammers. "I was blissfully unaware of this," he said. After our conversation, Janczuk told me, he notified Google of its mistake.

Without being aware of a DMCA takedown by Google, an individual can't know to file a counter notificati​on, as the practice is known—the first step to getting their content back in Google's search results.

Google and GitHub did not immediately respond to Motherboard's request for comment, and we will update this post if we hear from them.