GitHub has blocked the official SymPy documentation repository and the GitHub-hosted docs.sympy.org site after receiving a copyright infringement complaint from HackerRank, a company that specializes in developer competitions and hiring programmers. The blocking is based on the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA).
Following community outcry, HackerRank withdrew the complaint and acknowledged that the copyright infringement claim was sent in error. GitHub has released the lock on the SymPy repository and site. To avoid similar mistakes in the future, the head of HackerRank announced the suspension of the DMCA complaint process until the rules for determining violations are revised. As compensation, HackerRank intends to donate $25 to the SymPy project.
The SymPy project develops a Python computer algebra library for symbolic computation and application of discrete mathematics methods, which is popular among scientists, researchers and students. HackerRank's claims boiled down to the accusation of borrowing materials from the company's tests on one of the pages of the SymPy documentation site.
The story is interesting because, apparently, HackerRank employees at one time used excerpts from the official SymPy documentation in their tests. To combat copyright infringement on the network, HackerRank hired the WorthIT Solutions agency, whose representatives conducted a raid to identify facts of borrowing HackerRank materials, found an intersection and, without understanding, filed a copyright infringement complaint against the SymPy site, which hosted the documentation based on which tests were made.
It is noteworthy that this is not the first time that HackerRank has been convicted of sending untrue complaints in the past. For example, the PHP developers received a copyright complaint in January on the range() function page on php.net. Prior to this, more than 40 repositories were blocked by
Source: opennet.ru