Haha, perjury. A straightforward and somehow also mostly harmless case of it too! This take is off the rails. They did not lie on the notice. Mistakes of law aren’t perjury in any case. Mistakes of any kind are not perjury! The word perjury in the declaration doesn’t make every slip-up an imprisonable offence. People should be wary of using the term perjury without knowing what it means, because you will get laughed at.
The only thing that would prevent GitHub from having to take it down is its terms of service. If you accept that this person and their alt account are the same person, then as GitHub does not contract with @usernames but actual people, they gave GitHub a license to publish it on the web, revocable by actions by the controller of the alt account. Or however the terms of service lay this out. I don’t think you need DMCA to get this done, you can probably just show you are the account holder and revoke the license via email. DMCA takedown obviously implies this and has a process already.
A mistake would not be perjury, fully agreed, and I do know what the word means. Knowingly making a materially false declaration under penalty of perjury in a circumstance where a federal law specifies that penalty, however, would be perjury.
So, the main question here is whether it's knowingly and materially false of the claimant to assert that they are the owner of an exclusive right that was allegedly infringed. They clearly own an exclusive right with respect to the work, so the question reduces to whether it's knowingly and materially false that the exclusive right was allegedly infringed.
If a known bad-faith/inaccurate allegation suffices to make the exclusive right allegedly infringed, then the statement is true and there was no perjury. I'm doubtful that a court would rule that way, but it is possible.
Otherwise, the question of perjury finally boils down to whether the claimant understands that no right was being infringed, and I guess also to whether the knowing falsity of the resulting allegation was material according to the standards of the perjury statute. My guess is yes to both questions, hence calling it perjury. I think the notice sender had simply given up on more appropriate ways to get the stuff taken down and was trying any procedure, however ill-matched, to achieve the goal.
But equally, I agree that some of this might be hard to prove and definitely that none of it is worth the time of a prosecutor or court. It's a purely academic discussion.
DMCA takedowns do not in general imply any revocation of a license, by the way. If the takedown notice is contrary to the scope of a current and valid license, then either GitHub can realize that fact and choose to step outside the liability protections of the safe harbor for that notice and decline to act on the notice, or the target of the notice (usually not the same person as the one who issued it) can give a counter-notification and eventually have their hosting restored in the absence of a lawsuit during the resulting statutory waiting period.
> the question reduces to whether it's knowingly and materially false that the exclusive right was allegedly infringed.
> If a known bad-faith/inaccurate allegation suffices to make the exclusive right allegedly infringed, then the statement is true and there was no perjury.
I didn’t read after this, because if that were the determining question for the crime of perjury, every person and their lawyer who filed an affidavit in a case that eventually failed would be a criminal. Fortunately it is not. It is not possible to perjure yourself about the answer to a question that nobody in the universe knows for sure until a judge decides it. It is impossible to meet the definition of perjury in this fashion; you have to know it was false at the time you made the statement. Nobody knows whether an allegation of infringement will turn out to be true when they file a DMCA notice. They cannot know it.
Let me say that again: nobody is waiting with baited breath for the decision in a court case to find out if they have perjured themselves by filing it. I don’t know what planet you are living on if you think that happens. DMCA perjury most certainly does not cover the allegation of infringement that you think it does anyway, so maybe next time read the law before running with it all the way out the stadium and into a nearby river. (Edit: you did read the law I suppose. Reading laws is difficult; the way you reduced the question was fatally flawed. Partly because you did not understand that perjury is a crime with a specific definition outside the DMCA, not a punishment, and partly because… well, the way you reduced the question was fatally flawed.)
The only thing that would prevent GitHub from having to take it down is its terms of service. If you accept that this person and their alt account are the same person, then as GitHub does not contract with @usernames but actual people, they gave GitHub a license to publish it on the web, revocable by actions by the controller of the alt account. Or however the terms of service lay this out. I don’t think you need DMCA to get this done, you can probably just show you are the account holder and revoke the license via email. DMCA takedown obviously implies this and has a process already.