>There's no way they are going to claim that every user who uploaded code without owning the full rights is violating their TOS.

If they're taken to court and that part of the TOS is relevant to the issue, then yes, they can and will argue exactly that.

Well then let's hope the judges apply the same standards as when criminals claim they wasn't aware that the money they got was being laundered through them.

Doesn't banks/financial institutions have similar protection. Unless someone can prove that they were aware of it or it makes substantial part of operations. I haven't heard of Google being sued when play store cards are used bu fraud victims.

> Unless someone can prove that they were aware of it or it makes substantial part of operations.

In Norway I think the rule is often "is aware of it or should have been aware of it".

> I haven't heard of Google being sued when play store cards are used by fraud victims.

Banks try to prevent cards from being abused and I guess Google try to. For example when someone tried to buy jewelry in an American store with my stolen card number the card was immediately locked.

Sometimes something slips through though and banks won't be held accountable for that.

The difference here is that there is no way GitHub cannot be aware that people upload personal projects from EU and copies of open source projects etc without agreement from the copyright holder. Besides the easily missed clause in the terms there is nothing to prevent it. Now if they'd done any reasonable effort to inform about it: a couple of blog posts over the years, a "Please note:" banner, even mentioning it in discussions here on HN before doing this that would have counted to their defense.

As far as I am aware no such thing happened.

That would destroy their business.