this post was submitted on 04 Jun 2024
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Privacy
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I feel like intent should matter? And authority? You can't just leak information and say it's licensed now. The person who published it both didn't intend to do it and didn't have authority to release it.
I mean, that makes sense, but consider the other side. You find some document that very clearly says that you have a license to do whatever the hell you want with it.
In this particular case, you probably heard the news, but in many other cases, you just couldn't trust any license anymore, because there's just no way to know whether something was intended to be licensed like that. It would pretty much defeat the purpose of licensing anything at all.
I also feel like it shouldn't be the only thing that matters.
You can't license something openly and later say "oh we didn't intend to do that. Sorry we take it back"
Bleh, I really hate to side with Google, especially when releasing this documentation benefits users and hiding it benefits Google.
But it seems weird for this new license to be legally binding. If someone committed this to the wrong repo, and that person didn't have legal authority over the original content, then how can they have legally relicensed it?
Not sure, if this is precisely the same in the US, but here in Germany, employees act on behalf of their company. So, if you write such a documentation, your copyright is assigned to the company, but just as much, you're allowed to license this copyrighted work.
In many cases, this is absolutely necessary to do for your daily work. Like, maybe your job is to work with external contractors that implement changes to these search ranking parameters.
There is some things, like entering a contract, which require a signature to be legally valid. And signing things, that is something that not everyone can do. But yeah, you don't need a signature for licensing.
I‘m not sure of the legal implications but I would assume that a third party must not have to question the validity of a written license and therefore an action like this makes the person who did it responsible to google and the licensee. Just my impression though, IANAL.