You:
> I don't think Microsoft removed the copyright notice. I think that the original author did not add one...
Direct quote that from the file containing and requiring the copyright notice in derivative works that was not included in Microsoft's fork. This was also included in a comment which you have replied to:
> The above _copyright notice_ and this permission notice...
I thought people were saying that Microsoft removed the copyright headers and replaced them with them, which they did not.
Microsoft replaced the LICENSE for the whole repository with their own, and thanked Spegel in their README. While this is some kind of attribution, it's not enough for the MIT LICENSE. I don't know exactly what would be good enough, I think having a copy of the Spegel LICENSE file somewhere in their repo would be enough (though possibly less visible than the line in the README, to be fair).
My overall point is that it feels like people are complaining a lot about what seems to be an honest mistake. And not just that: the way Peerd did it is arguably giving more visibility to Spegel than if they had just copied the licence somewhere in their repo. Peerd could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README.
Anything else is noise, they violated the license. They blatantly copied copyrighted works. They can't "oopsie" that away or claim it as a mistake, honest or not. You simply are not allowed to do that.
Suggesting that they "could possible just copy the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README." is wrong. They MUST include the copyright notice and the rest of the license. They don't get to choose whether or not to respect the license. And they don't need to remove the link, That's got nothing to do with the copyright issues. No one at Microsoft thought that call out was somehow the legally required attribution clearly explained in the MIT license.
You do realise that those two statements are not incompatible? If they include the licence somewhere less visible and remove the link from their README, they are still including the copyright notice and the rest of the licence.
The MIT licence does NOT say that you MUST have it at the root of your repository in a file called LICENSE. It does not say that you must clearly identify the parts of the code for which you don't own the copyright or anything like this.
You can read it here: https://opensource.org/license/mit
