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Comment by snoman | Hacker News Reader

My understanding is that, if you directly assist someone violate a ToS, you can be held liable.

Bad analogy but the getaway driver doesn’t need to enter the bank to be guilty in the robbery.

Surely there's no way that's true. The logical conclusion of that would be that every random ToS is a law that everyone must abide by, regardless of whether or not they've agreed to it.

By definition, it is exactly a law. It's known as business law. The ToS is a business contract which you must agree to if you wish to use the service. Violating terms of service is literally a breach of contract.

How can you breach a contract if you are not a party to a contract? OpenCode is not using any Anthropic services, they are just publishing some source code that seems (obligatory IANAL) to be protected speech under the First Amendment [0], if this legal argument is happening in American jurisdiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech

Interesting point. I've been looking into a similar issue recently, and for example LinkedIn won a lawsuit against the analytics company hiQ because they violated their ToS for scraping their website. And I think they also never technically had a direct contract they'd breach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

Yes, but I think that there is a big difference. In the case you linked, hiQ were actually doing the scraping themselves.

People (or company? not sure) don't make any requests to Anthropic themselves. They just publish code that can make such requests.

I don't think that there is a legal precedent that would make publishing code that can do scraping illegal.

Yeah good point. I think if the scraping code is written specifically for a site / system that prohibits scraping through it's ToS, the company has an edge for a lawsuit. It's a bit of a gray area I think. It depends how much of a threat you form to the company you're scraping, and how big the company is.

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