“I came across this at a very sad point in my life, it was on a hard drive on a vintage computer I bought off Amazon,” Marshall explains on the expansion’s GitHub page. “Literally this essentially saved my life, I was going through a divorce and just happen[ing] to come across something like this was insane.”
Seeing as he obtained it legally, albeit by accident,
I think it would be whoever sold the hard disk that’s at fault.Granted, IANAL and the American legal system is fucky.Edit: Yeah I’m not a lawyer.
Nah that’s not how that works. He might have obtained it legally and accidentally. But he made the decision to then distribute it. He can most definitely get sued for that. If you want to distribute basically anything, you need the right permissions / license for that.
He doesn’t hold the copyright so has no right to distribute it. Like if you bought a manuscript from a book you don’t have the right to print copies of it and distribute it. Since you only are the owner of that specific manuscript not the copyright and distribution rights of the actual content.
Just finding something by accident doesn’t give you the right to publish it.
If you found someone manuscript in the drawer of a desk you bought, you would not gain the right to publish it, it still belongs to the person that wrote it. Physical possession has nothing to do with the right to distribute, that is IP law that goes back a hundred years.
Okay well would he at least be in less trouble than if he’d made any money off it?