Yeah unfortunately if the person who posted the code doesn’t “counter-notice” and if the host of the code doesn’t push back and say “your request doesn’t meet the requirements for a dmca takedown”, then companies will continue to get away with abusing these takedowns. Unfortunately the costs and anxiety of “no I’m actually in the right here” are born by the individual dev not the massive corporation.
And yeah replicating functionality is not copyright infringement. Kind of disappointed that the GitHub process is so lax that there wasn’t more pushback. There was obviously some, since there was the mention that this was a revised request. But like, they didn’t identify any actual content copied…
But I know the host has pretty limited push back abilities under the law. If there is actually no copied code, I would have hoped for a counter notice (which puts it back up and it’s then on the complainer to prove more thoroughly) but I totally understand it would be intimidating.
(Not a lawyer obviously.)
Reach out and complain, car buyers and Mazda owners.