Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by vova_hn2 86 days ago
How can you breach a contract if you are not a party to a contract? OpenCode is not using any Anthropic services, they are just publishing some source code that seems (obligatory IANAL) to be protected speech under the First Amendment [0], if this legal argument is happening in American jurisdiction.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_as_speech
1 comments
gitaarik 86 days ago
Interesting point. I've been looking into a similar issue recently, and for example LinkedIn won a lawsuit against the analytics company hiQ because they violated their ToS for scraping their website. And I think they also never technically had a direct contract they'd breach.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HiQ_Labs_v._LinkedIn

link
vova_hn2 86 days ago
Yes, but I think that there is a big difference. In the case you linked, hiQ were actually doing the scraping themselves.

People (or company? not sure) don't make any requests to Anthropic themselves. They just publish code that can make such requests.

I don't think that there is a legal precedent that would make publishing code that can do scraping illegal.

link
gitaarik 85 days ago
Yeah good point. I think if the scraping code is written specifically for a site / system that prohibits scraping through it's ToS, the company has an edge for a lawsuit. It's a bit of a gray area I think. It depends how much of a threat you form to the company you're scraping, and how big the company is.
link