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Comment by Eleison23 | Hacker News Reader

That's not obvious, because you don't necessarily own the code you're uploading. I can upload any sort of MIT-licensed, BSD-licensed, Apache-licensed, Creative-Commons-licensed, or GNU-copylefted works I want, anywhere within reason and compatible with those licenses, but if I didn't write them then I don't have the legal right to relicense, grant exclusive or restricted license to any specified parties.

So in a way this would void parts of many TOS agreements where you do relicense your User-Generated Content. If we're uploading memes to Facebook, they're gonna have to work out license terms with the copyright holders, not the uploaders.

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Uploading someone else's code without permissions is, in itself, copyright infringement. Just like you can't take someone else's code and license it to GitHub without the copyright holder's permission, you can't take images off of someone's website and sell/license them to Getty Images for profit.

I'm not sure that's the case if the repo is private and the code is not shared/disseminated to others. If you buy a book, you are not allowed to distribute copies of it, but you can loan it or sell your copy, or store it wherever you like. Copilot does allegedly distribute copies of code that it doesn't have the copyright to.

> Uploading someone else's code without permissions is, in itself, copyright infringement

Suppose person A comitted a crime, that does not mean you are now allowed to profit from someone else's crime

But imagine Getty Images sells the stolen photo 10,000 times. They had no idea it was illegally stolen and fraudulently passed off as the fraudster's own work. If they get sued for infringement, they can just sue the actual fraudster for damages.

Same will be for GitHub: if people really didn't have the legal authority to bind someone else's code to GitHub's TOS, then GitHub can go after the $x million of users that have uploaded code they shouldn't have.

>GitHub can go after the $x million of users that have uploaded code they shouldn't have.

Ok, but can they go after them in an efficient manner that doesn't end up costing more than it's worth?

> They had no idea it was illegally stolen and fraudulently passed off

Thats doesnt mean. Getty can keep the money

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