One of the (ex?) programmers from Valve managed to get it to spit out parts of the Source engine verbatim. He posted a Twitter thread yesterday I believe.
I don't think you can have your cake and eat it on this one.
It's kinda shocking that they think they can sell this, even providing it for free is extremely sketchy but at least complies with BSD/GNU/CC licensed stuff I guess.
Is every product user liable when a vendor ships some stolen code?
No, but the difference is the users of a product are typically not making and distributing copies. That’s not the case if you use someone else’s code in your project.
The user would be unlicensed, and in lieu of the vendor resolving this then the user would need to purchase licences to continue using the software legally (ie if a vendor gives you a pirate version of photoshop, you can’t just use it forever just because someone sold it to you).
There are usually clauses in enterprise software agreements that attribute liability for unlicenced components to the vendor for this reason. But ultimately if there isn’t a contract or the vendor vanishes, the user will need to go get a licence.
If you want to test the theory, I’ll send you a few images to put on your website, and when you get a claim through from the copyright owner you can try to argue that I sent it across without a copyright notice so I am liable ;)
That's not what copyright is protecting.
I believe github's lawyers would have had hundreds of hours of dicussion about this and at this point, they believe they are in the right, and anybody who disagrees should use the legal system to resolve the matter.
In the meantime, what it is and isn't doing wrt licenses seems to be poorly understood externally.