Remember: others' work is theirs unless they license it to you.
Just because you technically can copy something doesn't mean you're allowed to make and distribute copies or derivatives. If you do this professionally, you'll get yourself or your employer sued, and/or your work pulled off the internet against your will.
Two absurd claims:
1. Getting sued
2. Getting your work pulled off the internet
You say that you or your employer would be sued if you did this. Going through a legal battle over some copied HTML, CSS & JavaScript is expensive, distracting and time consuming. You'd first get a cease and desist letter. Who has the time or energy to sue over this?
Getting your work pulled off the internet against your will. How would that happen? Have you heard of the pirate bay? There's no off-switch because you used someones react component.
You might not like this tool or feel it facilitates behavior you consider unethical, and I get that, but these claims you made are absurd.
C&D is a low effort shot to stop infringement. Suits follow where wilful and especially profitable or profit-damaging activity that can be shown. Eg, you stick it in your product. Saying suits are fanciful is harmful because they do happen. They often settle early, but that's attention your employer won't thank you for. It'll be grounds in many cases.
Very familiar with TPB. Their founders did time for their involvement. I've also sent DMCA notices and had content pulled from services, even a domain pulled by its host because the owner ignored the notice. You absolutely can take extraordinary steps to work around it but you know... Maybe just write your own components?
I've no opinion on this tool. It's a tool, like a text editor or View Source. I'm posting because of what people are suggesting doing with it.
I don't disagree - write your own components in most cases.
Your original comment stated, as fact, "you'll get yourself or your employer sued, and/or your work pulled off the internet against your will."
You're right that suits do happen, and while there is a grain of truth in what you said, stating it the way you did is just too bold in my opinion. I highly doubt the individual developer would be sued. How would a company seeking damages know who made the git commit so they could target the developer?
The clarification in your reply about copying being willful, profitable and profit-damaging is where things start to make sense. And if you had said something along the lines of that, I wouldn't have replied and would have found myself in agreement.
Google respects robots.txt. Allowing Google scraping is optional. In fact many websites serve more content to google bot than to you before you log in, google bots clip through paywalls
All laws are arbitrary. But the story of how we got them is meaningful.
Copyright exists to encourage more copyable stuff to be made (pg has a good essay on this topic, where he observes history shows the opposite of a copyright regime isn't openness... It's guilds and secrecy cults). What Google does (interpreting the data that scans to help you find references to searches) is considered either transformative work, or recitation of fact. Copyright does not prevent somebody from doing those things because those things make works discoverable, which encourages people to make more stuff.
> Copyright exists to encourage more copyable stuff to be made
This is a backward legitimization attempt. Copyright was made because editors, authors and composers lobbied to get a monopoly on their creations and derivative work. As a matter of fact, copyright was continuously expanded on requests from rent-seeking copyright holders (which, in the overwhelming majority of case, aren't creators of any kind).
Not if you believe Jefferson's thoughts on the topic.
"It has been pretended by some, (and in England especially,) that inventors have a natural and exclusive right to their inventions, and not merely for their own lives, but inheritable to their heirs. But while it is a moot question whether the origin of any kind of property is derived from nature at all, it would be singular to admit a natural and even an hereditary right to inventors. It is agreed by those who have seriously considered the subject, that no individual has, of natural right, a separate property in an acre of land, for instance. By an universal law, indeed, whatever, whether fixed or movable, belongs to all men equally and in common, is the property for the moment of him who occupies it, but when he relinquishes the occupation, the property goes with it. Stable ownership is the gift of social law, and is given late in the progress of society... Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from [ideas], as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from anybody. Accordingly, it is a fact, as far as I am informed, that England was, until we copied her, the only country on earth which ever, by a general law, gave a legal right to the exclusive use of an idea. In some other countries it is sometimes done, in a great case, and by a special and personal act, but, generally speaking, other nations have thought that these monopolies produce more embarrassment than advantage to society; and it may be observed that the nations which refuse monopolies of invention, are as fruitful as England in new and useful devices." ~Thomas Jefferson, letter to Isaac McPherson, 13 Aug. 1813
The goal was to encourage innovation. I don't disagree at all that the goal was regulatory-captured in a significant way by rentiers, but its purpose is, counterintuitively, to incentivize pushing ideas out into the light.
This is a good illustration of what I call a “backward legitimization attempt”: you quote a letter that comes from ONE CENTURY after copyright was introduced.
And by the way, the Statute of Anne, was actually introduced as a way to end publisher's monopoly and create the public domain after a short period (14 years), how ironic.
we're a bit past this point by now. Most people npm install some package, use webpack/minify to bundle it up, and poof no copyright or attribution. Even though both MIT and BSD (the most common licenses) require this. Even if you do the magical incantation to retain comments in your bundle, many packages don't include copyright in the comments. They include it in a LICENSE or README file.
Once upon a time devs cared about this sort of thing. Living through the '90s and then now... where devs just pick the default license (MIT?) that github puts on a repo is crazy. There is this cultural assumption today that everything is just a public domain free-for-all.
"A copyright cannot cover ideas, procedures, or methods of operation. You can copyright your website’s design, but you can’t copyright the way you created the design."
If you use the components to create a new design then there is no copyright.
Just because you technically can copy something doesn't mean you're allowed to make and distribute copies or derivatives. If you do this professionally, you'll get yourself or your employer sued, and/or your work pulled off the internet against your will.
You wouldn't steal a policeman's helmet, etc.