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This kind of thing is very common in the entertainment industry, curious how Hn would react to a piece of proprietary/licensed code somehow discovered in some highly profitable SaaS product (is that even a thing?)

I have no ill intentions. I have no intention to ask them to stop selling the items. In fact, I’m happy people are nostalgic about VHS. I’m not looking to milk the situation at all. I’m not threatening to get a lawyer on their case. I’m just frustrated that I had to find out from someone else in the first place.

too passive aggressive, if your work was stolen and used in a product to make $ you have every right to be upset. Lawyer up and get paid.




Oh I'm positive this happens all the time. The GPL specifically is pretty restrictive and there are frequently cases where GPL licensed software has made it into nonfree distributions. There are several lawsuits by the Software Freedom Law Center regarding GPL licensed software that's been improperly distributed. After FSF vs. Cisco, legal departments have wizened up a little about this kind of thing, but I'm confident there is still a massive amount of infringement.


Depends what the license is. If someone was running their SAAS product on SQL server without a license, that's up to Microsoft to handle.

If it was a GPL license, well, the standard GPL doesn't really apply to code running on servers, even if it is modified code. That's why the Affero GPL was created.




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