The Android community just got a big scare. In the space of a few days, Qualcomm has both made and retracted a Digital Millennium Copyright Act request that took down 116 code repositories. As it turns out, quite a few of the targets were legitimate users running the company’s open source software. And you’ll definitely recognize some of the names, the move shut down code bases maintained by the CyanogenMod custom ROM team, Sony and even Qualcomm itself. Suffice it to say that the removal would have created a lot of headaches if you wanted to modify Android for the many, many devices with Snapdragon processors.
The Digital Millennium Copyright Act has a lot of issues, and one of them is the almost instantaneous way in which content can be removed from the web if a copyright holder thinks it’s in violation – it’s a pretty classic example of “guilty until proven innocent.” That double-edged sword is swinging back at Qualcomm today: the company issued an apology to developers after forcing popular code repository GitHub to remove over 100 repos for violation of copyright. “Cyveillance is authorized to act on behalf of QUALCOMM Incorporated and Qualcomm Technologies, Inc. (collectively, “Qualcomm”) in requesting removal of its copyrighted works from Internet sites. Under the U.S. Digital Millennium Copyright Act (17 U.S.C. § 512) and other applicable U.S. and international statutes, Cyveillance provides this notification of claimed infringement and requests that you immediately remove certain documents from your web site and/or disable access to those documents through your web site.”