GitHub has made changes to its rules for handling complaints alleging violations of the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). The changes concern the blocking of forks and determine the possibility of automatically blocking all forks of a repository in which a violation of someone else's intellectual property is confirmed.
The use of automatic blocking of all forks is provided only if more than 100 forks are recorded, the applicant has reviewed a sufficient number of forks and confirmed the violation of their intellectual property in them. To automatically block forks, the complainant must explicitly state in their complaint that, on the basis of the manual check performed, it can be concluded that all or most of the forks have an identical violation. If the number of forks does not exceed 100, then blocking is performed as before on the basis of an individual enumeration in the complaint of the forks identified by the complainant.
Automatic blocking of forks will help solve the problem of uncontrolled replication by users of blocked repositories. For example, in 2018, after the iBook bootloader code was leaked, Apple did not have time to send complaints about the appearance of forks, of which more than 250 were created and they continued to be created, despite Apple's best efforts to block the code leak. Apple demanded that GitHib block the entire chain of forks from repositories found to host iBoot, but GitHub refused and agreed to block only explicitly mentioned repositories, since the DMCA requires the exact identification of material in which a violation of proprietary rights was found.
In November last year, following the youtube-dl ban incident, GitHub added a warning not to re-post blocked content by other users, as doing so is considered a violation of the GitHub terms of service and may result in the suspension of the user's account. This warning was not enough and now GitHub has agreed to block all forks at once.
Source: opennet.ru