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Comment by lovich | Hacker News Reader

I got into this with another set of engineers on Reddit where I discovered there’s a subculture of engineers who don’t believe you can’t actually own code and apparently take a copy of their employers source code repository everytime they switch jobs.

Edit: Updated “can actually own code” to “can’t actually own code”

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FYI the edit might have made it more confusing, since there's a double negative now. "don't believe you can't actually own code" reads as "believe you can actually own code", which I'm not sure is what you were going for.

Well fuck, too late to edit it again. My grammatical error shall live on forever

One thing I regret is not taking a copy of the code I wrote for another company, so many handy little utility functions I made that I then had to recreate. The transaction costs for b2b are far too high for any reasonable sale, so exfiltration is the utilitarian choice.

That’s still just theft if you’re not a contractor? Full time software employees are doing work for hire. There’s plenty of moral and ideological arguments about theft being morally acceptable in this situation but I was more marveling at the people who thought that taking source code from their company was legally not theft

1. Suppose the OP did not take the source code files, but memorized the source code and later recalled it from memory. Would that be theft?

2. Suppose the OP neither took the file nor memorized the code, but had photographic memory and replayed the exact visual scenes during their creation of the utility functions and copied down the code from what they saw in their mind's eye. Would that be theft?

3. Suppose the OP was solving a seemingly novel problem and suddenly remembered how they solved the exact same problem when they were employed by company X. Are they obligated to banish this solution from their mind?

> 1. Suppose the OP did not take the source code files, but memorized the source code and later recalled it from memory. Would that be theft?

It is copyright infringement, yes. That's why clean room implementations are done by someone who hasn't seen the original source code,

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clean_room_design

For the other examples, it depends but I'm pretty sure a copyright infringement case for either of them wouldn't be immediately thrown out. IANAL but I do know that law is quite fuzzy.

Suppose the OP wrote the original source code files and recreated them from their own intuition of the problem. Would that be theft?

It's not theft, it's copyright infringement and is very morally and practically different from theft.

The range of circumstances in which it is morally acceptable are MUCH broader.

There are situations where developers emailed/cloud uploaded/took hard drive of code they had been working on when he left the organization and were looking at prison sentences for theft...not copyright infringement. They didn't even give it to someone or reuse it somewhere. Just the fact of trying to keep it when they left as illegal.

All that to say that in some circumstances taking source code is considered theft.

Got a link?

Look up Sergey Aleynikov.

"Theft of trade secrets" is a specific legal term, not a subset of theft.

in my country, copying source code is definitely theft and is contractually enforced. but reproducing similar concepts/architectures from memory happens often

It's quite literally IP theft, not just copyright infringement.

Your jurisdiction may have a law called "IP theft" or it may not, either way the moral category of "theft" does nor apply.

(Also, if it was theft this particular example would be theft in the same way that taking a book from someone's recycling bin would be theft: no one is worse off)

Owning code would be akin as owning language.

You mean like copyright?

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