I think it's important to clearly state that FreeCodeCamp committed copyright infringement. It doesn't matter if we think it was an honest mistake ...
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This has definitely thrown me for a loop too, even as someone who has never written for this site before. I've actually decided from this to make a rule that any content I post from now on lives in full on my entire site.
Before my Dev articles were only here and I linked to them from my site, but from now I'm going to cross-post and mark my site as the canonical URLs. Don't get me wrong I trust Dev to not pull something like this, but everything has made me err on the side of caution. No matter what happens, I want to be certain that my writing has a safe and secure place on my own site.
And rightfully so. We're working on some ideas specifically around this notion which will help folks control their content in a more explicitly self-hosted sort of way. You can already do that in some ways, but from a tooling perspective we want to make it easier and more powerful.
We want to provide a shared ecosystem for learning from one another and collaborating on software ideas where folks feel safe doing so, we don't want to hold people's great work hostage.
We'll announce some of these plans soon. Articulating ideas is way harder than having them, but I'm excited to be able to offer some clarity in this respect in the not-too-distant future.
Blog posts and articles are protected by the DMCA in the United States. If anyone feels inclined to exercise their copyright in this situation, here are some relevant links:
Why and how to file a DMCA takedown notice
Who.is registrar info for FreeCodeCamp
NameCheap's DMCA form - scroll to the bottom, choose "Abuse Reports", then "Copyright / DMCA".
Make sure to include all the necessary information in your request (Sara Hawkins provides a template in the first link above).
I know there are differing opinions on the DMCA and I usually wouldn't bring it up, but I have yet to see any indication that FreeCodeCamp has noticed or cares about this massive copyright infringement and this may be the last recourse for some people.
I understand they may have done this hastily and I also don’t have any skin in the game. They could have given a heads up. We know he didn’t switch over alone and someone must’ve known. On the other hand Medium sucks and FCC has helped so many people for free I would hope people could let this go. Chock it up to helping people.
Making a mistake is one thing, persisting in a broken state is another. FCC needs to actively resolve the current situation, regardless of how they got here.
I have no issues with Medium, though I don't see they've behaved in appropriately here.
I think it's fair to criticize Medium on how they handled certain things leading up to this and in their past. But with regard to this precise situation, they acted predictably and in accordance with previous cases like Hackernoon.
I feel like FCC is purposefully conflating the situation to make it an "us vs them" situation, when it really isn't.