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HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

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Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#121

Post by jfarmer »

josephcsible wrote: post #93
jfarmer wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fuck the DMCA, not GitHub! AFAIK, they're legally required to take down material as soon as they receive a DMCA notice or else lose their safe harbor status. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Notice_and_take_down

If you don't take down something you get a DMCA notice for, do you lose safe harbor status for everything, or just for that one thing? If the latter, then wouldn't it be a good move for GitHub to ignore DMCA requests that their lawyers are sure wouldn't hold water?

As I understand, there are different safe harbors and each applies at the "service" level. It's "online service providers" that have safe harbor status.

If you lose safe harbor status you become liable for infringing content on that service.

Infringement still has to happen and you'd still have to be taken to court and lose, but it's now "as if" you yourself uploaded everything.

So in this instance GitHub would be fine, but if they didn't take down the content then they themselves would become liable for any fringing content on their platform.

Or rather Microsoft would become liable, I suppose.

IANAL. That's just my rough understanding.

Fenwick and West has a lovely 36-page FAQ: https://assets.fenwick.com/legacy/FenwickDocuments/DMCA-QA.p...

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#122

Post by jeroenhd »

MarkMarine wrote: post #107
jeroenhd wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are you seriously claiming copyright over other people's solutions? You have *no* right, legally or ethically, to exercise any kind of control over "solutions to company assessments" under the DMCA. At worst, you can try to exercise the controls in the EULA that your victims agreed to, but this sounds like abuse of the legal system.

But it's working. Here is a DCMA the author tried to fight, saying hacker rank doesn't publish their solutions, and the solution is the sole work of the author: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ea3736a0c4c9574e0c8cea06... guess what, it's still offline for DCMA.

The problem with the DMCA is that if the claimant disagrees with your counter notice, the content stays offline for at least enough time for a lawsuit be be filed over the contents of the post, if the claimant is actually willing to take the matter to court.

I don't think anyone will actually go through the expenses to go to court over a code snippet on Github, unless they're particularly principled, wealthy, and retired and I think Hackerrank will definitely try to send their in their legal team.

By just filing a counter notice, you're also doxing yourself to people who clearly have no interest in following the law.

Github seems to have processed the DMCA counter notice but the content is still offline. From that I gather that Hackerrank filed a lawsuit or the counter notice was retracted somehow, or Github is violating the DMCA by keeping the content offline.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#123

Post by brian_cloutier »

__app_dev__ wrote: post #81
zamalek wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

HackerRank and LeetCode are a scourge on our industry, for more reasons than this shitty behavior.

Well said!! Personally, I like designing and building software and have been doing so for 20+ years but after doing several HakerRank and Leetcode style interviews it makes me wish to do something else. I’ve had FAANG recruiters tell me “study for hours per day for a few months” and then you can be ready. Even smaller companies focus on leetcode more than actual experience. I’ve worked with plenty of optimal algorith…

Neither HackerRank nor Leetcode invented this style of interview. The questions you're complaining about predate both sites. The sites were created to help you study for those questions, they did not significantly popularize the questions.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#124

Post by josephcsible »

jeroenhd wrote: post #122
MarkMarine wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But it's working. Here is a DCMA the author tried to fight, saying hacker rank doesn't publish their solutions, and the solution is the sole work of the author: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/ea3736a0c4c9574e0c8cea06... guess what, it's still offline for DCMA.

The problem with the DMCA is that if the claimant disagrees with your counter notice, the content stays offline for at least enough time for a lawsuit be be filed over the contents of the post, if the claimant is actually willing to take the matter to court. I don't think anyone will actually go through the expenses to go to court over a code snippet on Github, unless they're particularly principled, wealthy, and ret…

Yeah, the fact that the DMCA works like that makes it a guilty-until-proven-innocent system.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#125

Post by certik »

rvivek wrote: post #37

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. Sorry, everyone! EDIT: update here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31092085

Dear Vivek, thank you for the note. I am the original author of SymPy. Most people who work on SymPy myself included do it in our free time. So far this has cost many hours of my and many other people's free time to try to figure out what is going on and to get this resolved. I also personally reject your allegations against us.

I thought about this situation and how your company could make this right. If you would be willing to help improve the SymPy project, I think it would be very well received. If you are interested, please let us know! See Travis Oliphant's reply, you could for example donate some money to NumFOCUS. We are very good with using money that people or companies donate to fund development and we can really boost SymPy forward big time with a generous donation.

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#126

Post by not2b »

rvivek wrote: post #113
oscarbenjamin wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks Vivek for responding. Speaking as one of the maintainers of SymPy (who received the DCMA takedown request by email) I would like to note some points: 1. If you do a web search for "HackerRank DMCA" you will find similar examples of this that have happened in the past (with exactly the same text). 2. The text of the request is not in any way designed to enable a reasonable response. No detail is given about wha…

Oscar, thank you for responding and I'm terribly sorry for the disruption this has caused. I should have taken this more seriously when it sprung up on HN the first time but for whatever reason we just fixed that problem and moved on. This is a serious one and we are working on a strategy that is sustainable. Meanwhile, if we need to make a monetary contribution for your effort or anything more we could do to promote…

If you don't want to utterly destroy your company's reputation and have every company that depends on Python or other critical open source infrastructure boycotting you, you need to stop. Just stop. Don't send out any DMCA notices at all, not unless you encounter a case of infringement so blatant that it is obvious to all. And then make the decision yourself, don't contract it out. The risk of damage to others and blowback to you is too great. You're risking the failure of your company if something like this happens another time after two high-profile cases; damage to your company could be that bad.

And here's the thing: if there's a match between the SymPy Docs and something you consider yours, the copying was quite likely in the reverse direction: the solution you claim copies something out of the SymPy documentation (which is legal, but it isn't yours).

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#128

Post by jeroenhd »

dang wrote: post #33
0des wrote: post #19

Why is a YC company not held to a better standard? This is poor form.

I've emailed them. I'm sure it's unintentional but yeah it's bad and should be fixed pronto.

I hope your faith in them will turn out to be justified, but there is clearly a pattern to their behaviour. In a previous takedown reported here just five months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29239594), the takedown was not reversed either; for some projects the takedown was likely legitimate, but for others this was obvious abuse.

The founder states in a comment (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31091354) that "[their] intention with this initiative is to takedown plagiarized code snippets or solutions to company assessments", practically admitting that they are knowingly abusing DMCA systems to execute takedowns of other people's code. They can definitely take down plagiarized code snippets under the DMCA, but they have no right to take down "solutions to company assessments".

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#129

Post by calibas »

brasic wrote: post #117
zomglings wrote: post #38

I apologize in advance for the profanity. This really pissed me off. FUCK you HackerRank, for even entertaining the notion of litigating open source projects at scale for no good reason. FUCK you for taking down the the documentation for a harmless open source symbolic mathematics engine without any justification that I can see. What content of your shitty ranking company could SymPy possibly have infringed on? Also…

> your DMCA policy to take down the repository without even a standby period (perhaps with a warning?). See https://github.com/github/dmca/pull/10944 : > Before disabling any content in relation to this takedown notice, GitHub > - contacted the owners of some or all of the affected repositories to give them an opportunity to make changes. > - provided information on how to submit a DMCA Counter Notice. (Disclosure: I…

One of the SymPy maintainers said they responded within 2 hours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31091731

Re: HackerRank (YC S11) DMCA'ed the SymPy Docs [fixed]

#130

Post by jeroenhd »

not2b wrote: post #104
gurjeet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the archived copy of the URL in the takedown notice. https://web.archive.org/web/20220114132753/https://docs.symp...

If this was the page that triggered the takedown, any copying was probably in the reverse direction (that is, the HackerRank material copied something from the documentation, which is legal, and their idiot copyright enforcer doesn't understand that).

It says a lot about the quality of Hackerrank as a company if they admit that the readme for an open source project contains the coveted solutions to their problems.
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