GitHub has changed its complaint handling rules regarding violations of the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The changes pertain to the blocking of forks and establish the possibility of automatically blocking all forks of a repository where a violation of someone else's intellectual property has been confirmed.
Automatic blocking of all forks is only applicable if there are over 100 forks, the complainant has reviewed a sufficient number of forks, and confirmed a violation of their intellectual property within them. For automatic blocking, the complainant must explicitly state in their complaint that a manual review indicates identical violations in all or most of the forks. If the number of forks does not exceed 100, blocking is still performed based on the individual listing of forks identified by the complainant in their complaint.
Automatic blocking of forks will help address the issue of uncontrolled replication of blocked repositories by users. For example, in 2018, following a leak of the iBook loader code, Apple was unable to keep up with issuing complaint requests for over 250 forks that continued to be created despite all of Apple's efforts to stop the code leak. Apple demanded that GitHub block the entire chain of forks from repositories found to be hosting iBoot, but GitHub refused and agreed to block only the specifically mentioned repositories, as the DMCA requires precise identification of the material in which the infringement of property rights is identified.
In November of last year, following the incident with the blocking of youtube-dl, GitHub added a warning against the reposting of blocked content by other users, as such actions are considered a violation of GitHub's terms of use and may lead to the suspension of the user's account. This warning proved to be insufficient, and now GitHub has agreed to block all forks immediately.
Source: opennet.ru
