4 ms·

This is not how it works. Courts do not care that it's a beta.

• seanhunter 5y ago
  Courts care about "equity" (restoring fairness). So the scope of the breach determines what is a fair remedy to make the plaintiff whole. A breach in a beta release (with lower circulation) would seem to be lower impact than a breach in a production release in that context.
  • tptacek 5y ago
    Are you saying this based on actual knowledge of how this stuff works? I ask, because the person you're responding to definitely is (and also I like to keep track of who the lawyers are on HN.)
    • dathinab 5y ago
      I'm definitely not a lawyer, but many things in law (especially around copyright) are based on "damage done". Like if you distribute one illegal copy (1) you will get a very different penalty then if you distributed 1 Million illegal copies. In case of TickTok it being in beta does indeed not matter but what matters is that it being in beta entailed it being used by a limited amount of users for a rather short time (in this case). (1): It should be noted here that I heard of cases where copyright lawyers liked to argue that one copy was further distributed an lead to many many more copies, and in turn damage done. I have no idea how far this is the case in practice and how far this is legally successful. Either way in this case the infringing product seems to be rather tightly bound to a non-infringing service, including some license key/beta key mechanism. So it shouldn't matter in this case, I guess.
• dathinab 5y ago
  Yes, but court cares about damages done, number of infringing copies and duration of infringement, which in case of a newly started closed(?) beta are not much.