[jawns]

I don't think anybody familiar with the two services had any doubt that this would happen, eventually.

Squirt.io is another service that does the same thing as Spree, and I can't imagine that it won't soon be in Spritz's crosshairs as well -- especially since in its Acknowledgements section, the first to be credited is "Spritz Inc, the company whose patents are pending."

One thing I'm curious about is whether leaving the code publicly accessible, but in a "commented out" state, ostensibly rendering the program non-functional, is sufficient.

Like, suppose I wrote a small open-source text editor whose default text upon startup is the entirety of "Fifty Shades of Grey." And E.L. James' people contact me and say, "Hey, you can't do that. E.L. James holds the copyright to that text." If I merely comment out the text, rather than wipe it from the source code, have I really fulfilled my responsibility to not infringe on James' copyright?

[darkarmani]

> If I merely comment out the text, rather than wipe it from the source code, have I really fulfilled my responsibility to not infringe on James' copyright?

The difference is copyright versus patents. For copyright, you definitely need to remove it. For patents, I think it was openssh that used to have patented algorithms in the source that you could compile into your binary if you had a license.

[mcherm]

No. Because every time you send people a copy of your code, you are distributing a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey. And making a copy of Fifty Shades of Grey without permission is precisely what copyright law prevents.