My assumption from that dialog box would be that at most, the code I currently have open in my editor would be uploaded. Not all the source code on my computer.
Edit to add: oh, wait, I misunderstood. It grabs all the code on your computer? That's crazy. I just meant it's not totally unreasonable to grab the whole git repo you're working in, say.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/cloud-to-butt-plus...
Even without that, basic contract law in many places requires a degree of mutual understanding for the contract to be valid in the first place. You can't just bury a surprising term with a huge effect deep inside a long legalese document and expect it to actually stand up in court, and if you're doing something dubious and relying on that as your defence then you might be in for some disappointment.
Maybe even corporate espionage.
Copyright infringement is not theft. These are two completely different issues. When data is copied it is not taken away from the owner like when physical goods are stolen. Secondary damages may or may not occur, but they are not the same as depriving someone of a good. As an analogy, I wouldn't steal a car, but I surely would copy a car if I could do so by simply pressing a button...
Legally, the word "theft" isn't only used when one party loses anything; a victim of identity theft doesn't lose their identity, yet we don't call it "identity infringement". I'm not familiar enough with US law to know for sure, but it wouldn't surprise me if the word "theft" is used somewhere for obtaining sensitive information without permission.
It's one thing to infringe on the copyright of a public work
Another, very different thing is to copy something that's not public and might be considered IP or a trade secret
This happens to be the one under which Kite would fall (since they're infringing copyright for "commercial advantage").
But that's about as unlikely as the code containing trade secrets.
Plus:
- For copyright infringement, they'd need to actually redistribute the code. Using it for machine learning and distributing short snippets wouldn't be copyright infringement.
- For that trade secret stuff you'd need to prove intent.
IANAL, but I don't think so. In MAI v. Peak[1], the court determined that even loading a program from disk to RAM was a copy, and therefore infringing without a license. Congress has since then added a specific exception for "Machine maintenance and repair", but that's it. Copying from a remote machine and storing it in their disks should certainly qualify.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAI_Systems_Corp._v._Peak_Comp....
Unpublished code, is itself a trade secret. Even just the processes, procedures, organisation, tooling, library use, etc in the code provides a competitive advantage. i.e. The 'metadata' is also a trade secret.
The only intent you'd need to prove is that the accused is using the trade secret to the 'economic benefit of anyone other than the owner'.
It seems obvious that Kite is training a proprietary ML algorithm, with trade secrets, for their own economic benefit.
Obviously this would a be a terrible thing to do and no one should.
Now that doesn't make it any less shady though...