GitHub is committed to shaping public policies that support developers around the globe. Last year, we advised policymakers, supported legal action, and spoke directly to developers on policy in jurisdictions around the world. As part of our commitment to developers, we’d like to share some highlights of what GitHub Policy did for you in 2020.

Platform responsibility

As the home for all developers, we work to maintain developer love and trust by providing a safe, healthy, and inclusive platform. This includes advocating to  protect safe harbors for software collaboration, as well as collaboratively developing our  site policies with our community,  leading by example in our content moderation policies and practices, and shipping our  annual transparency report. Our work was especially important last year around the  reinstatement of youtube-dl.

In 2020, we worked to shape rules on platform responsibility around the world in ways that support developer collaboration. We engaged on proposed intermediary liability rules in  India with Mozilla and Cloudflare, in the  US with Engine (an advocacy group for small and medium tech companies), and in the  EU with OpenForum Europe. We also engaged policymakers on  multiple bills tackling  copyright liability reform in the US. As EU countries are transposing the Copyright Directive in their national laws, we succeeded in getting the Netherlands to fix its version by moving the carveout for open source software development platforms to the binding part of its law. We also  provided the developer platform perspective to a set of  principles on transparency and accountability in content moderation.

Additionally, we recommitted to prioritizing developers’ privacy with the  removal of all non-essential cookies and cookie banners from GitHub, and continued assuring the  data protection for all  of our developers and customers in light of the invalidation of the EU-US Privacy Shield.

Innovation policy

GitHub fights for public policies that enable developers to innovate—whether that is through copyright rules, patent regulations, or employment laws. The  Oracle v. Google case before the Supreme Court, which is still awaiting a decision, will have significant impacts on developers, including the application of copyright to APIs. We also weighed in on needed  reform to the way patents are challenged and assessed.

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