GitHub has published an annual report that reflects the notifications of intellectual property infringement and the publication of illegal content received in 2022. Under the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), GitHub received 2022 DMCA requests in 2321, resulting in the blocking of 25387 projects. For comparison, in 2021 there were 1828 requests for blocking, covering 19191 projects, in 2020 - 2097 and 36901, in 2019 - 1762 and 14371. 44 denials of illegal blocking were received from repository owners.
There were 6 requests from government agencies to remove content due to violations of local laws, all of which were received from Russia. None of the requests were completed. For comparison, in 2021, there were 26 block requests affecting 69 projects and sent from Russia, China and Hong Kong. There were also 40 user disclosure requests from foreign government agencies: 4 from Brazil, 4 from France, 22 from India, with one request from Argentina, Bulgaria, San Marino, Spain, Switzerland and Ukraine.
In addition, 6 removal requests were received related to violation of local laws, which also violated the terms of service (Terms of Service). Requests covered 17 user accounts and 15 repositories. Disinformation (Australia) and violation of the terms of use of GitHub Pages (Russia) are indicated as the reasons for blocking.
Due to complaints of non-DMCA terms of service violations, GitHub hid 12860 accounts (2021 in 4585 and 2020 in 4826), of which 480 were subsequently reinstated. Account holder access lockouts were attempted on 428 occasions (58 accounts were subsequently unlocked). For 8822 accounts, both blocking and hiding were applied at the same time (115 accounts were then restored). In the context of projects, 4507 projects were disabled and only 6 were returned.
GitHub also received 432 requests to disclose user data (up from 2021 in 335 and 2020 in 303). 274 such requests were sent in the form of subpoenas (265 criminal cases and 9 civil cases), 97 court orders and 22 search warrants. 97.9% of requests were sent by law enforcement, and 2.1% by civil lawsuits. 350 requests out of 432 were satisfied, resulting in the disclosure of information about 2363 accounts (in 2020 - 1671). Users were notified of the disclosure of their data only 8 times, as the remaining 342 requests were provided with a non-disclosure order (gag order).
A certain number of requests also came from US intelligence agencies under the covert surveillance for foreign intelligence law, but the exact number of requests in this category is not disclosed, it is only reported that such requests are less than 250, and the number of accounts disclosed is in the range from 250 to 499 .
In 2022, GitHub received 763 appeals (up from 2021 in 1504 and 2020 in 2500) for unjustified blocking of export restrictions on territories subject to U.S. sanctions. 603 appeals were accepted (251 from Crimea, 96 from DPR, 20 from LPR, 224 from Syria and 223 from countries that could not be determined), 153 were rejected and 7 were returned with a request for additional information.
Source: opennet.ru