
Our response to the war in Ukraine
As the global response to the tragedies in Ukraine and other impacted regions continues to evolve, I wanted to share with our community an expansion of the message that I shared earlier this week with our Hubbers.
Security research makes us all safer, but too often developers face ambiguous rules and possible criminal liability when they do quality assurance work to find security holes in their stack.…
Security research makes us all safer, but too often developers face ambiguous rules and possible criminal liability when they do quality assurance work to find security holes in their stack. Current DMCA Section 1201 rules should be clearer, otherwise they will continue to chill security research and leave everyone less safe. To this end, GitHub has filed comments with the Copyright Office supporting a request by Professor J. Alex Halderman and others for a broader safe harbor for good faith security research.
Our comments are part of the Eighth Triennial Section 1201 Proceeding for exemptions to the Digital Millennium Copyright Act’s prohibition against circumventing technological protection measures (“circumvention”). That’s a mouthful, I know. If you’d like a refresher, see our previous post about the process.
Our comments emphasize four points:
When developers face less FUD, they can make software more secure, and we’re all better off. We hope that the Copyright Office will agree. You can find the full text of our comments here.
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