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Comment by judge2020 | Hacker News Reader

judge2020

Since MIT has this line:

> The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

MS would be in the wrong to redistribute this code without the notice that includes '(c) 2020 LesnyRumcajs' - however, just changing the line doesn't constitute copyright infringement or fraud if MS reverses the change and/or simply appends the original MIT license above their MIT license (since MS does indeed have '5 commits ahead' of the origin repo, all of those changes are copyright MS but still MIT licensed). They could even simply have a file called 'LICENSE2' with the original notice, if they can't easily exclude this repo from the bot.

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Given that this change was committed to the main branch, if I download the code right now, haven't Microsoft redistributed it?

Things get philosophical rather quickly I'm afraid. If I misconfigure an FTP server, and you download some MIT code that I stripped the copyrights from, does that count as redistribution?

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No. If you hack into my company and siphon out an EXE for an internal tool that uses GPL licensed code, you are not entitled to the source code of the package because the company did not “distribute” it to you; you took it without any right to have it.

There’s a whole philosophical debate we can have where we quibble over the definitions of words as they deal with technology, but the (US) courts generally don’t care about technicalities. An analogy is stolen property. If you purchase something that is stolen property, you have (almost) no legal right to it; the courts will often order its seizure for return to the original owner. By “hacking” (according to the CFAA), you “stole” the EXE.

I would say that it isnt, because you had no intent to redistribute it.

But you cant make that argument here, as its a public repo, as such Microsoft did have the intent to redistribute.

But wouldn't this case fall under the same?

Your argument is that a misconfigured FTP server isn't intent to distribute.

What if this was a misconfigured fork that was meant to be private but was set public? Not intent to distribute either.

Those two things are far more similar to each other than to a public repo whose intent is to redistribute. So no, this case is not the same as either a misconfigured FTP server or a misconfigured repo.

Yes, it counts as distribution. Why you would even stripped copyrights form?

The "5 commits ahead" are literally only replacing the license and the readmes.

So the only part of the repo that is legitimately copyrighted by Microsoft is the Microsoft copyright notice? I love how meta this is.

I see. Thank you for the explanation.

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