@antlers @swheritage If the goal is to engineer a complex solution that meets all of SWH's goals while respecting trans people, it turns out it's even more complex than this. I haven't gotten there in the story yet

But it would require them to work with trans people to develop the solution, which they won't.

More relevantly, by now, they also won't consider easier solutions that work against their goals, such as taking down their archive of ftfy.

@arborelia @antlers @swheritage Oh, they archived my software that is marked "all rights reserved" and absolutely is not under any open source license.

They demand a date of birth for removal requests, assholes.

@ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage Can't you file a copyright claim at that point?

@endrift @arborelia @antlers @swheritage I sent them a takedown notice.

French law doesn't have anything like fair use, so...

@ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage I smell multiple legal cases against them incoming

@endrift @ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage I smell weirdly technical answers.

I don't actually think there's blockchain stuff behind SHA; I've interacted with its API too much. What I do think there is is an abuse of git (it's very unlikely that you'll have two git commits with the exact same hash) and part of the datastore involves deduplication via git histories. This almost makes sense, but it does mean that undoing that will require a lot of work that may or may not cause downstream issues.

There's a git koan about this.

There's been times the SHA is the only place I can find someone's long-dead project that they spite-deleted after someone made a passing remark about them they didn't like, causing them to go full nuclear destruction on every bit of their code/online presence.

This has happened enough times that I'd afford two Seattle priced lattes if I had a quarter every time someone did this to otherwise important software.

@endrift @ryanc @arborelia @antlers @swheritage And this sucks. Both in that they're one of the few places that isn't Internet Archive that has software archives that don't flake out.

One of the core issues is that there's no *clean* way of handling name changes between histories, and in part that's by design (imagine editing software to credit yourself that you didn't write) but leaves others in the dust (post-namechange, etc.)

@ryanc @endrift @antlers @swheritage good luck! They have never replied to my takedown notice but I bet if you’re in the EU you’ll have a better shot

@ryanc @endrift @antlers @swheritage and yeah they now have my birthdate and birthplace and a scan of my ID, all for nothing it seems

@arborelia @endrift @antlers @swheritage I'm a UK resident and should have EU and UK passports soon, so... maybe?

If they ask for a scan of my ID, I'll contact Gandi's legal department, then get a French lawyer, screw that.

@ryanc @endrift @antlers @swheritage oh actually I ended up reading the UK’s version of the GDPR and it sounds _powerful_

@arborelia @endrift @antlers @swheritage I the right to rectification for gender purposes regularly. I also have a California address so I can use California Consumer Privacy Act on American companies.

@ryanc I don't like this dystopian cyberpunk take on being a citizen of the world...

@womble I'll probably end up with a different gender listed on each of my passports too. 😡​

@womble Also, I do strategic work at an AAA megacorp, so my position in the cyberpunk dystopia is a little odd.

@arborelia @endrift @antlers @swheritage

From what I can tell, the way French copyright law is written seems as though it would constitute infringement of the author's moral rights to refuse to honor a request to change how they're identified.

It additionally seems to grant authors a right to withdraw their work that cannot be contracted away, though paying compensation to the publisher may be required.

Again, as far as I can tell, an open source license does not remove the author's moral rights.

These people seem to be doing a serious fuck around and find out with French copyright law...

@lukeshu @arborelia @swheritage
`git-filter-repo`'s Readme mentions (as Design Rational \#8) that it even sets this up for us! But I won't pretend (re: it's complicated) to know what other limitions or goals SWH might have in mind. Super exited for the rest of the posts c:

@aliceif @arborelia the thing about last names in such systems is that usually, people, including lawmakers don't care. like iirc in germany if you change your last name there is no obligation to rewrite old data/documents with that name, you will just have to provide a certificate of some sorts that this used to be your previous name to get stuff acknowledged. I've heard this happen a lot with credentials/qualifications acquired at school, uni or somewhere else. please don't quote me on that because I genuinely don't know the legal situation regarding that, but that's just been my experience anyway

@aliceif @arborelia and more often than not, last name changes aren't seen as an integral part of someone's identity, so there's less of a push to force people to use the current last name in old data/documents.

generally: people suck and tech people often especially suck in regards to names

@TerrorBite exactly that. What they have is 100 trivial forks of the old copy from other people’s github accounts

@arborelia @TerrorBite TerrorBite: It is not a "mutation", but a correction...think "git amend" for example. As an owner of the copyrighted work, the author (arborella) is perfectly within his/her right to do that, and with the right to tell others to update their copies (I am aware that this can get a bit tricky...IANAL).

Good example: The first Star Wars movie was released, and it didn't have scene where Han Solo walked with Jabba the Hutt nor the scene where the Death Star got destroyed with the distinctive ring flying away. Those were added later, and George Lucas demanded and got the original version destroyed. He can do that since he owns the movie (copyright).It is VERY difficult to find the original version now. I do remember watching the original version.

Since it appears that arborella doesn't live in France, it may require a lawyer specializing in an international copyright law to deal with it. And maybe a "touch" of a LGBT lawyer as well. I feel it is a more straightforward case, but I dunno. I wish arborella best of luck!

@thebluewizard Oh oh course, I'm not disputing that it's within @arborelia's rights to do that. I fully support her right to do whatever she likes with her own code, and I also wish her luck in fighting for her rights.

As for the term “mutation”, I took that from her own blog post where she described the git-filter-repo operation.

I also think a lawyer might be needed at this point, but since this is only part 1 of 3, I'll wait to hear the rest of the story rather than speculating or offering advice.

@thebluewizard @arborelia Straightforward case? Nah, this is a queerford case

@TerrorBite @arborelia I don't know anything about "queerford case".