[undecisive]

IANAL, but I think it comes down to your interpretation of section 4:

> You may convey verbatim copies of the Program's source code as you

> receive it, in any medium, provided that you conspicuously and

> appropriately publish on each copy an appropriate copyright notice;

> keep intact all notices stating that this License and any

> non-permissive terms added in accord with section 7 apply to the code;

> keep intact all notices of the absence of any warranty; and give all

> recipients a copy of this License along with the Program.

So by removing the copyright notice from "each copy" of the "convey"ed source code, I think you could argue they violated this.

But as others have argued, even if you don't believe that this section forbids it, the polite thing to do would be to either a) get permission to remove the copyright notices, or at the very least b) create a file (e.g. CONTRIBUTORS.md, or a section of the readme) and place the copyright information in there. Saying "Ooh, we don't like X's name at the top of the file, it's too ugly" without any attempt to maintain some acknowledgement might not be a violation, but certainly isn't within the spirit of the AGPL, the main point of which is to "(1) assert copyright on the software".

[dbzer0]

Hey there lead dev. The reason we don't contact hlky is because he's extremely hostile and has attempted to sabotage us by taking down components of the AI Horde when he flounced. There's also acts from him against myself personally which make it too traumatic to reach out. Even a mention of his name is instantly raising my stress level. What I mean to say, it's not always so easy to "play nice".

As I said, I tried to stick to the facts in this post so it's easy in isolation to think we're being petty dicks, but there's a reason we had to rewrite a WHOLE AGPL3 ML library from scratch, instead of re-use the existing AGPL3 library we had, because it was associated with hlky.

[undecisive]

Sure.

So I discussed this situation generically, because the specific situation doesn't really matter given the question asked. And no, I said it was impolite - but I totally understand that impolite is a big step up from toxic.

The bigger issue is, and maybe this doesn't apply here, but creating a situation where there may be a legal copyright claim to be made simply gives the a-hole more leverage over you, which is exactly what you don't want, if even the mention of his username is triggering.

(I won't point out that you mentioned his username 10 times in your blog post!)

So weigh up the risk/reward. If he's done a DMCA, and you've batted it back, the next step is legal proceedings. A license is exactly that - a license, it never assigns ownership. If I remember correctly, AGPL3 has protections so that he cannot revoke the license on a whim - unless you break the AGPL3 license.

You will never own the copyright to that file, no matter how much you desperately want to, no matter how many times you change the file, no matter if you remove his name, no matter how much you feel like you've paid in dealing with him being a dick. If he can make a case that the file you have is not significantly different in nature to the one he wrote, he still owns that file.

Toxic people will be toxic, but never get into a pissing fight with a skunk.