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People are misunderstanding this and claiming it's not problematic because the tweet in the HN link is idiocy.

They show one URL in one installer script with an obsproject.com domain and conclude, from the presence of that URL alone, that the entire project is a whole cloth copy of OBS.

That URL is nothing but a 302 redirect to the directx runtime at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/Download/confirmation.aspx?i...

The linked tweet tells us nothing except that TikTok is essentially using obsproject.com's web server as a URL shortener.

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Again, to be clear, we've decompiled the TikTok LIVE Studio binary and confirmed that it uses code derived from OBS Studio.

> that the entire project is a whole cloth copy of OBS.

That is a straw man argument. It doesn't matter what percent of the infringing product uses GPL-licensed code.

What if it’s one character?

I believe the parent poster implicitly meant "as long as it's copyrightable" as a caveat

So copyrightable is 2 char?

No.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threshold_of_originality

One of the first tests for infringement is "substantial similarity"(see [1] for example). If you claim copyright infringement on the basis of any small number of characters your case will be tossed by the judge. There isn't a specific number of characters that need to be copied before it becomes "substantial" because the court gets to rule on that based on the context etc.

[1]https://www.legalzoom.com/articles/copyright-infringement-an...

But it's not one character.

What if it’s 10 characters?

It's not 10 characters either.

The realm of what does and doesn't constitute a license violation is complex and, in the end, up to the whims of the legal system. For this particular issue it appears that an actionable amount of the project is in use.

Agree

Yes, clearly, the TikTok employee writing that original bog-boring DirectX dependency installer script felt his best choice here was to use the OBS URL as a URL shortener.

Truly this is the strongest possible interpretation of this circumstantial evidence and does not make you look like an idiot (re idiocy) at all. You would rather write this comment than simply navigate to the OBS github and find the copy of this installer script in there.

Why would a company the size of tiktok want to depend on some open source project maintaining a URL? Would they be liable if it instead redirected to malware?

Possibly. But most likely there was a bug "crashing when DirectX is not installed" and some developer hacked a silent install for DirectX in without thinking too much.

A OBS developer went into detail here [1] about how they figured this out. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29592103#29595349

> a company the size of tiktok

Is made up of smaller teams composed of individuals who may or may not take shortcuts and make good decisions on behalf of their company. If the choice is between "executive said 'hey use this open source in secret'" or "programmer took shortcut," my bet is on the latter.

And management never reads the code.

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