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Comment by fallingsquirrel | Hacker News Reader

It's still online, grab it while you can

https://github.com/googleapis/elixir-google-api/commit/078b4...

I think the repo was also cloned here... <https://github.com/yoshi-code-bot/elixir-google-api/commit/d...> and considering the original repo is apache 2... not sure they can legally force them to be removed.

What am I looking at?

You're looking at a commit that contains all of the leaked files/documentation conveniently on the directory view on side of the github page.

That tells me literally nothing. This is all machine generated boilerplate code. This isn't executive emails or documents. Since when are comments written by nameless workers an authoritative newsworthy leak on corporate policy? It probably tells us something about what sort of things workers at Google have researched, e.g. csam, scams, racism. If I grep for SEO then I see some database fields for their pagespeed service that mentions accessibility audits and progressive web apps. Looks pretty consistent with what Google has always said publicly. Where's the specific code that's generating all the shock and outrage?

There are plenty of breakdowns of what exactly the technical documents contain, including the stuff I just said. In great detail! Google ironically here is your friend. It confirms what SEO practitioners have been saying for years that Google has actively been discrediting with flat out falsehoods, such as they don’t use domain authority anywhere in their ranking (documentation describes fields named domainAuthority), they track clicks in great detail (which they have vigorously denied), and they use chrome usage data as a factor in their rankings. Hope that helps

Licenses don't work like that. Accidentally releasing something under a license doesn't mean it will forever carry that license.

Regarding trade secrets, inadvertent or accidental disclosure means it is no longer a trade secret - no protection. And regarding copyright, there is Oracle vs. Google that copying APIs is fair use (Google's argument). So even if the copyright license grant in the leak is held to be invalid (the license states it is perpetual, if it is valid it does forever carry that license), it would be fair use anyway. I think the only IP protection is patents, Google has patents on various parts of the system so if you did actually want to build a Google clone by reverse-engineering their documentation you would run into trouble.

I think serving the docs themselves is likely illegal, though. You don't actually have a right to distribute copies just because someone pushed a wrong button and they were made visible in a repo that has a top-level Apache 2 license.

Sure, they can't stop people who received a copy from studying it and using or discussing the information in there. But I think they can almost certainly stop them from (legally) distributing that information to others.

Apache 2 is irrevocable, and you can redistribute it however you wish. I think it's safe to assume as soon as it was pushed public to the original google repo it's was covered under apache 2. that entire repo was distributed by google as Apache 2. So if you pull that commit, as far as I would be concerned everything in it is apache 2 since that's the license it's distributed with. We have no idea why that code was pushed, and it doesn't matter from a public perspective.

None of that matters if the company never intended to publish it as Apache 2, and can show they took immediate steps to correct their mistake. The law is not code, and intent matters.

source or relevant case? Because if someone pulls before it's another commit that removes it... you would have absolutely zero idea why they removed it, or you wouldn't even know it was removed. Or even if you still pull that commit that as of yesterday after over 1 month was still in the google repo, there's no info that it shouldn't be there... And I think pushing code to a public opensource repo, shows intent to publish it...

I wonder if anyone's ever tried to figure out if APIs are copyrightable...

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/04/how-the-supreme-...

It was online in 2022 too: https://github.com/googleapis/google-api-php-client-services...

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