Last week a Mac app called Avalw Shield launched charging $499 lifetime to auto-lock your screen when you walk away using face detection. The comments were brutal about the pricing so I built FaceGuard over a weekend — same core feature, free, MIT licensed.
They filed a DMCA takedown against my repo. Their claim is that I infringed by using:
- AVCaptureSession (Apple's camera framework)
- VNDetectFaceRectanglesRequest (Apple's Vision framework)
- CGSession -suspend (20 year old system call)
- SMAppService (Apple's login item framework)
Every single item is a public Apple API documented at developer.apple.com. There is no proprietary code to copy. The only way to build this feature on macOS is to use these exact frameworks.
I'm 15. I wrote every line myself. Filing a counter notice today.
Repo is temporarily down due to the takedown. Will be back up after counter-notice resolves.