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Comment by gpm | Hacker News Reader

> That might mean running it on its own is technically illegal.

Based on what law/authority?

Copyright law forbids making copies, derivative works, etc. Not using things. You're allowed to read a book without a license.

Moreover copyright law makes an explicit exception for the copies required to run a computer program on a machine that aren't used in other ways (i.e. copying it to ram/registers): https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/117

The author may say "you can't use this", but it is not clear to me that he has any legal authority to do so.

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Quite so. As written, it's a null statement. To be enforceable, a license has to be written by one party such that another party may acquire rights in exchange for accepting the terms. This is how licenses become contracts.

Simply reading the words "Don't use it" does not bind you, because there is no grant of use; there is no offer or exchange of value, so no contract has been formed, and the statement is at best advisory. It is equal to writing "All rights reserved", which is to say, you retain whatever rights pre-existed under statutory and common law, such as right of fair use and so forth, and anything due to Github's ToS.

Engineers often fall into the trap of thinking the law is a programming language. It isn't, mercifully.

As pointed out in other comments, music and drama are exceptions to this where their ‘use’ is protected by copyright. You can read a play aloud if you like, but you can’t perform it publicly without permission (or royalties).

That's the typical outcome, but not by exception to this analysis; if a work of music or drama included an equally poorly worded "license", then the rights and obligations of all parties would similarly fall back to the terms of service of the platform through which the work was acquired, with a backstop of the Berne Convention, TRIPS agreement, TPPT, and various EU directives (or rather more specifically, the local implementation of those, assuming your jurisdiction is a signatory to any).

That is not a blanket exemption. It is for "the owner of a copy of a computer program".

If you stole a copy of Microsoft Office on CD from a shop (back when that was a thing) it seems clear that using the software would have been a copyright infringement because you wouldn't have been the owner.

In this case you have the right to download the software (via the github agreement) but how does that relate to ownership and the legal exemption? I've no idea.

I believe "owner" here is just referring to classical property rights, you literally own the magnetized platter which encodes the program, like you literally own the ink and paper that makes up a book. Once you've downloaded the software you have a version of it on your hard disk (or ssd) that you literally "own" (but you don't own the copyright to it).

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