How is it cool to put someone else's non-free copyrighted work on github?
I'm not a fan of DRM or what they did to Sim City... I've also got nothing against reverse engineering, excerpting code snippets, and that sort of thing. But violating the terms of GitHub, in addition to someone's copyright? Not cool.
Its uploaded in a nonprofit way, for educational purposes. It is a very small portion of the complete work. The effect of the use upon the potential market is either small or non-existant.
That is three out of the four-factor balancing test regarding fair use. If we guess that this is about 0.3% of the complete work (3MB of a very very large final product), that would be comparable to use 30s clip of a film.
I don't think this is a huge deal, but I'm going to have to go with the GP. This would be an extremely poor example of fair use, and would really only dilute the positive meanings of "fair use".
Fair use is meant to preserve access to copyrighted works by the public that granted copyright in the first place--to maintain certain rights for the public and to ensure that any works built upon copyrighted works (whether that's through inspired creativity or just commentary on the original) aren't themselves held hostage by the original copyright holder.
Nothing in this example is transformative of the original work. The poster just released something that somebody else holds the copyright to. The educational aspect is an extremely weak argument; something merely existing in front of your eyes is not educational. The classic take on educational fair use for this would be taking minimal samples from the source and providing commentary upon them (why they did something the way they did, how they solved a problem that plagues a lot of developers, etc).
It's also certainly not a minimal sampling of the material. The code has been minified, but there appears to be a substantial portion of their UI code intact here, and I wouldn't be surprised if it is largely functional without much more work. It would be dishonest to compare 3MB of scripts to a final game including assets, and even with substantial commentary and insight added to the code, you would not be able to justify redistributing this amount of the source. Again, it isn't quoting from a larger source, it's providing the entire source for large portions of the game engine.
IP law aside, I feel the same way about this as I imagine I would have felt if the Doom 3 source had leaked early: no, you won't be able to play the game for free with it, and it is cool to see, but it's shitty that the people that actually wrote it had no say in its release.
Do you feel confident enough in this assessment that you'd feel comfortable slapping a GPL license on this thing and using it in a project? (Nevermind for a moment that this code isn't at all re-usable.) I feel like that's more or less the standard that should apply to github. It's kind of a disservice to people who are using github for open source but are making effort to avoid this kind of taint. Maybe it's hyperbole but it makes it one step closer to github being "that place where I pirate simcity".
I would feel the same confidence regarding a 30s clip of a movie. That is to say, I would not feel confident at all, but that has nothing to do with the law and all to do how it is interpreted. I do however think that 30s clip of a 3hr movie, or 0.3% of the source code for a game should be small enough that fair use arguments can be made.
While github is often used as a publishing tool, it is also commonly used as a place where work-in-progress is placed. Thus, if someone wanted to create a commentary about a piece of copyrighted material (say, the DRM part of a game), I would personally consider copying the related code into a github repository for refinement to be fair use. So long the four-factor balancing test is fulfilled, why limit the available tools? Should the workplace where such refinement is taking place be limited only as private repositories where each party has a copyright license?
I would also like to note that nowhere in the law does it say that fair use must minimize their usage of the copyrighted work. The law says under its four-factor balancing test:
the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to
the copyrighted work as a whole.
How it is interpreted has changed widely in the last 15 years. Some talk about the minimal necessary amount for his or her intended use. Other talks about "the heart of the work". For a time, De minimis was considered, through was later reversed in 2005.
I'm not a fan of DRM or what they did to Sim City... I've also got nothing against reverse engineering, excerpting code snippets, and that sort of thing. But violating the terms of GitHub, in addition to someone's copyright? Not cool.