Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Flat UI DMCA Takedown

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

91–100 of 151 posts

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#91

Post by supercoder »

kayoone wrote: post #83
supercoder wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I lost respect for LayerVault when their software that I paid what I thought was good money for totally corrupted the PSD of an entire project that had 2 months worth of work put into it. I thought I had a backup on my laptop, desktop, remote backup from my desktop and all the revisions on their server. But all revisions were corrupted and it synced those bad copies to all my machines, including the machine that perf…

This is bad but it also looks like you didnt have a proper backup strategy. Their service looks like a versioning/syncing service but not a backup service.

Well that's the thing, I actually thought my backup strategy was decent enough. Multiple versioned copies in multiple places.

My desktop was being backed up nightly to a remote source. Though it was the laptop (which wasnt being backed up) which I was doing the work on / changes to. But I saw that layer vault was syncing the changes to the desktop so figured it was fine.

So it went Laptop -> Layer Vault -> Desktop -> Remote Backup. But of course everything that passed through Layer Vault got corrupted. And eventually it 'resynced' all that corruption back to the laptop and the file went completely dead. So there ended up being no good copies of it.

So yeah in hindsight can say it was my fault for not doing nightlys of the laptop. But at the time I thought my strategy was fine, trusting that while at worst I'd lose a few versions or something if something terrible happened, not for it to actively destroy the file.

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#92

Post by SeanLuke »

zizee wrote: post #20
askimto wrote: post #15

Something can be a "rip off" and not infringe.

My feeling is that you should be able to imitate something without infringing on copyright, but not everyone agrees: http://www.dpreview.com/news/2012/01/25/Imitated_Image_Copyr...

That case was in Britain, which is different both in copyright law and underlying philosophy. The DMCA is US law.

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#94

Post by Karunamon »

forwardslash wrote: post #45
salmanapk wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Damn people are so dumb.. way to ruin your reputation. This is why I should start my own start-up :| Oh and did the developer of Flat UI file a counter takedown notice? Edit: Sorry if I offended anyone, just posted what I thought.

They did: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2013-03-06-LayerV...

So why isn't their repo put back up? I thought the standard procedure was notice-takedown-counternotice-restore?

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#95

Post by eksith »

supercoder wrote: post #91
kayoone wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is bad but it also looks like you didnt have a proper backup strategy. Their service looks like a versioning/syncing service but not a backup service.

Well that's the thing, I actually thought my backup strategy was decent enough. Multiple versioned copies in multiple places. My desktop was being backed up nightly to a remote source. Though it was the laptop (which wasnt being backed up) which I was doing the work on / changes to. But I saw that layer vault was syncing the changes to the desktop so figured it was fine. So it went Laptop -> Layer Vault -> Desktop ->…

One kind of anything is a single point of failure.

Well hindsight is always 20/20, but your backup strategy still relied on a single service (that wasn't your own). Backup is one thing no one should completely rely on a third-party. Whether it's a USB drive, good ol' DVDs or what have you, anything else "of your own" is crucial at least weekly if not end-of-day.

The effort going into your backups must match the value you place on your data.

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#96

Post by papercrane »

Karunamon wrote: post #94
forwardslash wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They did: https://github.com/github/dmca/blob/master/2013-03-06-LayerV...

So why isn't their repo put back up? I thought the standard procedure was notice-takedown-counternotice-restore?

There is a minimum waiting period after counter-notice (10 days I think.)

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#99

Post by martinced »

newishuser wrote: post #52

If you want to speak up, don't hesitate to contact LayerVault's support ( support@layervault.com ) and let them know, respectfully, how you feel. You can also tweet your opinions @layervault. I stress respectfully. Try to be well spoken and sincere.

I disagree with this. When you have an issue with a company, that company is going to try to use all the little power it has to turn the issue in its favor. If you contact them, you're giving them power (the power not to answer your emails, the power to reply privately in a harsh way, etc.).

So go public. On a medium which the company doesn't control. And then they're not in control anymore.

It's exactly the same with SO: everytime someone comes up with a very valid criticism about SO there are SO officials (or high-rep users) saying "Put this on meta". But no, that's precisely the point: do certainly not put it on meta because once it's on meta it's the same little clique who's in control.

My opinion is that something like this reaching several times the front page of HN is the best way to make people aware of the problem (including the people at the company/ies concerned).

Re: Flat UI DMCA Takedown

#100

Post by tripzilch »

pyre wrote: post #14
kombine wrote: post #2

Just read the DCMA notice. Does it really mean anyone can write this sort of message, without any details or proof and you have to oblige to it?

The basic idea is that for a provider (Github, Google, etc), to keep their Safe Harbour protections, they have to act like a 'dumb pipe' and just obey these notices. Just like how the phone companies trying to keep their Common Carrier status[1]. Even without the DMCA, if the service provider interjects itself into the dispute they risk legal action against themselves. For example, they could evaluate the claims wron…

Thanks for the explanation, two questions:

1) what happens with perjury? how severe is "penalty of perjury"?

If at point 5, LayerVault chooses not to take legal action (say, because they realized their mistake), did they just take some random piece of work offline for 10-14 days without any consequence?

What if they do take legal action and lose?

2) You say the provider has to act like a "dumb pipe" and just obey these notices. Does this also exclude basic sanity checks such as calling back the phone number on the notice to check whether the corporation in question actually filed this notice, or whether notice-filer actually exists, whether the phone number is actually connected to the corporation the notice claims to be from, etc? Because otherwise, it's just a matter of time until somebody is going to ... take down all the things.

I just checked Wikipedia on perjury and it says, "Statements which entail an interpretation of fact are not perjury because people often draw inaccurate conclusions unwittingly, or make honest mistakes without the intent to deceive. Individuals may have honest but mistaken beliefs about certain facts, or their recollection may be inaccurate, or may have a different perception of what is the accurate way to state the truth", I think this is pretty much the case for LayerVault. So they won't get penalty of perjury, because they did believe their work had been infringed ... even when it's based on a wrong idea of what constitutes an actual infringement instead of a "heavily inspired by" rip-off?

Post reply on HN