It was this behavior which led to publications like Hackernoon and FreeCodeCamp to begin leaving.
Ultimately the reasons for wanting to leave make a lot of sense. Doing it _in this way_ is the troubling part.
As part of this migration, FreeCodeCamp has removed canonical URLs from submitted posts - your original post is now competing with freecodecamp.org, and Google (and other search engines) is going to do a duplicate content check. Considering that FCC is in the top 2000 sites in the world according to Alexa[1], there’s a _strong_ chance your site will be penalized. This is a big deal for authors.
They are a nonprofit, so they have the option of offering each author a tax deduction as payment for content. If you have entered into any rights deal with them directly, you may not have standing to make a DMCA claim; take care not to knowingly do so under such circumstances, as that is likely a crime under US federal law.
Their hosting provider will likely also want to be notified of your DMCA claim, as they may be in violation of contractual agreements signed for their hosting.
(1) https://s3.amazonaws.com/freecodecamp/Free+Code+Camp+Inc+IRS...
Engineers are often subject to the whims of management, tight deadlines, dependency quirks, their own personal bias, and so on. A living example would showcase all of those things, but unless you annotate each line and comment excessively, you lose a lot of context.
It's also much easier to follow a tutorial than to dig through commit history and piece everything together yourself.
In the end it seems very strange that Medium, FreeCodeCamp and the authors all were intertwined in very strange ways as far as ownership and why they were involved together.
It's really pain when you open the blog and you get they paywall to say "You read much ...". Really, It's annoying what Medium become.
"You own the rights to the content you create and post on Medium"
Wait what? If it's my content and I own the rights, I can repost it wherever I wish.
If you, the same legal entity, are both poster and republisher, then Medium’s statement is both true and irrelevant to you, as you retain the right of export that they guarantee is the poster’s to exercise.
Many publications that pay for content secure the perpetual right to publish the content and usually some expiring right to exclusive publishing of the content and the writers themselves retain copyright. Not sure if FreeCodeCamp did this.
