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Scale, intent and impact do actually matter in copyright. Copying a single API can be ok, and copying a million of them might not be OK. There's a reason for th
by zmmmmm 5y ago
Scale, intent and impact do actually matter in copyright. Copying a single API can be ok, and copying a million of them might not be OK. There's a reason for the word "fair" in "fair use".
If a whole project was copied verbatim and the license violated I think everyone would agree that was wrong. So then is copying the same quantity of code across 1000 projects wrong?
Is setting up a process and a system that does that systematically, at scale with intent and then commercialises the result wrong?
- ineedasername 5y agoDoesn't "fair use" limitations go out the window if the license is permissive enough to allow commercial use of the source code? As I've said in other comments, I still think this was the wrong way for GitHub to do this-- opt-in would have been much better-- but outside of licenses with commercial restrictions I'm not sure there's a license violation here, no more than scraping hundreds of public domain books to create paid reprints would be a problem, or using the same to create a corpus for NLP machine learning.
- TheCoelacanth 5y agoFair use wouldn't matter if you were distributing the code in a way that followed the license, but the vast majority of permissive licenses require including the copyright notice, which they don't do. Only niche licenses like WTFPL would be permissible to use like this without invoking fair use.