[Tutor] Borrowing restricted code

[Steven D'Aprano]

On Thu, Dec 06, 2018 at 10:41:37AM +0000, Alan Gauld via Tutor wrote:
> On 06/12/2018 00:45, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
>
> > As for what is "not worth prosecuting", there are no copyright police 
> > who troll the internet looking for copied lines of code. Nobody is going 
> > to be scanning your Github repos looking for infringement (at least not 
> 
> Sorry, that's not strictly true. I know of at least two large companies
> who have full time teams whose job is to trawl Github, sourceforge
> and a few others looking at new checkins for unlicensed use of
> corporate code. And one of those teams is not even a technical
> team, they are corporate lawyers... And they do prosecute (or at least
> threaten to).

Ah, that's my error. When I said "copyright police", I was actually 
talking about *actual* law enforcement, not private companies. Sorry for 
not being more clear.


> > But they're not going to open up your Python folder and demand to see 
> > licences for everything or question whether or not you copy code from 
> > Stackoverflow without permission.
> 
> Again bodies like FAST(*) certainly do that (with police cooperation
> of course - they need a search warrant).

Again, I was specifically talking about customs agents.

I don't know who FAST is, but if they're like the Business Software 
Alliance they're effectively a front for Microsoft to strong-arm 
companies into buying Microsoft software under the threat of copyright 
infringement lawsuits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BSA_%28The_Software_Alliance%29

If they're not in the pocket of Microsoft as the BSA is (was?) then 
they're in the pocket of their members. They're not White Knight 
palladins searching for pirated software out of their sense of ethical 
outrage, they're doing it because they're paid to.


> But they have been known to
> litigate and fines of several thousand pounds have been issued to
> infringers(?) But FAST is rarely interested in FOSS software its
> commercial code they worry about. 

Point of order: FOSS *is* commercial code (or at least can be). Just ask 
Red Hat, Apple, Mozilla and even Microsoft.

I think you mean that it is *proprietary* code they care about, and 
even then, I daresay they only litigate on behalf of their clients.



-- 
Steve