

Ask HN: someone infringes my code on GitHub, what should I do? - taw_9292433

(Written from a throwaway username.)<p>I built a fairly popular project licensed under MIT and hosted on GitHub. Someone forked it, made some changes and gradually removed my name in each revision.<p>At first, he changed the author name in the copyright notice, manifest files etc. to his name and leaved an attribution with link to my repo in the readme. In the most recent commit, he removed that attribution. Now the only way somebody knows this is my work is looking at the tiny &quot;forked from...&quot; line in GitHub (guess he hasn&#x27;t figured a way to remove it, yet).<p>At this moment, his repo is basically a refactoring of mine (both code and documentation) with some features he added. If he sells or distributes this software, the audiences would never know I&#x27;m the original author.<p>While I&#x27;m make no money (zero dollar) from this software, I feel very upset because the least I would expect from someone who builds something from both my idea and code is an attribution. Otherwise I would have released the software under the public domain.<p>My questions are:
* Is this a violation of the MIT license? 
* What should I do about it?  (I don&#x27;t want to lawyers, again, I&#x27;m not making money from this project.)<p>Any opinion is much appreciated.
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kkowalczyk
MIT license requires attribution ("The above copyright notice and this
permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of
the Software.") so removing you copyright violates the license.

Realistically, there's not much you can do.

You could sue that person but it would be costly (lawyers fees) and the
outcome is unknown (those things usually are not litigated so there's little
case law to fall back on).

You could send them an e-mail to the effect of "I noticed you've removed my
name from your fork of my project. It's not cool and violates the attribution
clause of MIT license. I would appreciate it if you restored my copyright
attribution.". The important thing would be to not be too forceful or else you
might end up with the opposite result (i.e. they'll just dig in).

Or you can just let it go.

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BruceIV
IANAL, but it seems like it would break the "The above copyright notice ...
shall be included in all ... substantial portions of the Software."

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krapp
Put in a pull request?

