Standing up for developers: the GitHub Developer Rights Fellowship at Stanford Law School

GitHub’s Developer Defense Fund will enable independent legal support from the Stanford Juelsgaard Clinic to review and handle appropriate DMCA cases for developers on GitHub and across the software ecosystem.

| 3 minutes

It is hard to stand up for your rights if you don’t know what they are. The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) was written to strike a complicated balance between innovation, speech, and creative work online. This complexity—in particular Section 1201, which prohibits circumvention of technological protection measures like digital rights management (DRM)—is especially hard on open source developers working in their spare time, without the resources of a large company behind them. When developers looking to learn, tinker, or make beneficial tools face a takedown claim under Section 1201, it is often simpler and safer to just fold, removing code from public view and out of the common good.

At GitHub, we want to fix this. We want to make sure that developers on GitHub know their rights and have the backing to assert them. This is why we are putting our hear from you.


Follow GitHub Policy on Twitter for updates about the laws and regulations that impact developers.

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