My understanding is that some people were fired, others were warned. This was most likely done by number of times they exploited the system. Say tens of infractions compared to a few.

There likely was some threshold which some went over and everyone fired should have known based on written policy.

> should have known based on written policy

Ah yes, it was in the EULA. Which everyone always reads.

If you've got an otherwise good employee it's incredibly dumb to lose them over this. Clearly they can see when people are abusing the system, so why not warn them before they go over the threshold for getting fired?

Your terms of employment matter more than a EULA, and at the pay scale in question they can be expected to be literate or hire a lawyer. I’d be quite surprised if they weren’t given clear instructions the first time they used the system at a company big enough to have had lawsuits before.

“Incredibly good” is a value judgement we don’t have evidence to assess but I don’t think you could support that claim here in any case: people who break ethics rules on small things are pretty likely to break them on big things. No mstter what else they’re bringing to the table, that’s a risk.