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Comment by dizhn | Hacker News Reader

This person is really confused about licenses and copyright.

> Please note that this code is property of Valve-Software and any contributions that you make are considered a donation into the public domain.

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Legitimately seems like a GPT-tier confusion. Just put all the somewhat-relevant words in a syntactically correct configuration and call it done.

Heh, it's like all those YouTube videos where someone uploads a song and the uploader puts "No copyright infringement intended" in the text description, sometimes with five or six exclamation marks just to really make sure they avoid the takedown.

Often they drop the "infringement" and just have "no copyright intended" because they don't actually know what copyright is beyond it being a word in the emails they get from youtube.

"Credit to X"

What are you talking about? GPT4 would not do that kind of mistake. I must say, reading comments like this, that GPT4 actually comes across as more intelligent than many hn commenters

This is a common 'copyright infringement NOT intended ALL rights belong to X' type of widespread misunderstanding of how copyright actually works, and it's why I'm convinced that if most people understood copyright they would think it was absurd.

The sheer amount of YouTube videos where people put that as a disclaimer so think it's fine is kind of shocking.

Well to be fair YT has made it confusing because some of the time it is. Some artists allow fan uploads like that and just collect the ad revenue off it.

So really in the modern era no copyright intended really is a message to the artist/label saying it's a fan video, they're not trying to impersonate the official one and asking for it to stay. The uploader might not know that that's what they're really asking but credit to YT for making this arrangement work to preserve some of the site's original culture.

The message means nothing though and is based on a poor understanding of how copyright works.

If it's allowed the message is irrelevant, and i it's not allow it's also irrelevant as it will be ignored and the video removed.

young people gonna do

Unlike other commenters, I think the author of the article meant to say you can't hope to license contributions built ontop leaked code, obviously, so it'll always be a gray area that one could call "public domain".

One could call it pea soup and it'd be approximately as correct.

He's a hacker, not a laywer.

Anyone vaguely near software development really should have a working understanding of copyright though.

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