What legal issues/other issues from uploading your code to GitHub are you worried about?
I can't imagine that GitHub would steal your code. They've never heard of you, they have no reason to believe your code is worth anything to them, and one "I have pretty damn good evidence that GitHub stole my code" could ruin their entire business.
You mentioned legal issues. Are you afraid someone's going to ... subpoena your code or something? Because if that happens, you'd have to turn it over anyway.
They've got some pretty intense-looking security[1], and people like Twitter trust them with their code[2]. If they aren't worried, why are you?
2: I don't know that that's officially known, but I saw Twitter commenting on the "GitHub now has Organizations" post complaining about the lack of the cheaper plan that they added the next day. So they definitely have some private repos on GitHub.
I don't live in the US. Our company isn't based in the US. While I'm somewhat familiar with US legislation by reading HN, I certainly don't feel comfortable to upload my code to US based servers of a US company as I plainly don't know their laws well enough to trust them with my companies intellectual property.
Of course, I could always trust them for now and instantly remove my stuff when there are signs of trouble, but I asked them (a year ago) whether deletions are instant and irreversible and they told me the usual thing: repositories are not instantly deleted so they could restore them in case of accidental deletions. In addition they stay around in backups for an indefinite time.
Legislation not known well enough and no control over the removal of my code from their machines - call me paranoid, but these are good reasons not to upload my code to them.
I can't imagine that GitHub would steal your code. They've never heard of you, they have no reason to believe your code is worth anything to them, and one "I have pretty damn good evidence that GitHub stole my code" could ruin their entire business.
You mentioned legal issues. Are you afraid someone's going to ... subpoena your code or something? Because if that happens, you'd have to turn it over anyway.
They've got some pretty intense-looking security[1], and people like Twitter trust them with their code[2]. If they aren't worried, why are you?
1: http://help.github.com/security/
2: I don't know that that's officially known, but I saw Twitter commenting on the "GitHub now has Organizations" post complaining about the lack of the cheaper plan that they added the next day. So they definitely have some private repos on GitHub.