ergophobe - 2:50 pm on Jul 25, 2007 (gmt 0)

Imagine if "Example's diner on example street" sued Wendy's cause Dave used to work there

Imagine if Dave had made off with a truckload of ingredients after having signed an agreement that taking anything off the premises. That would be considered theft.

Like Jake says, it's all about the contract. If he signed an NDA, he's screwed. If he got paid $10/hour as a student programmer to do a few things on a non-contract basis, he's probably in the clear.

I could easily see a student programmer taking such liberties with a project he contracted on and it doesn't matter how much better Facebook is *now*. What matters is did he steal enough code to get up and running and make enough money to actually sustain himself while he hired people to write really good code?

The simple fact is that a lot of kids that age don't mind "borrowing". When I was teaching (at one of the top state institutions in the country), I saw things like

- student papers taken verbatim out of well-known books
- papers cut and pasted from a handful of web pages
- a student who stole another student's paper out of a computer lab printer and turned it in as his own. They had different teaching assistants and didn't realize that the TAs regularly got together to grade.

TA1: "Wow, this guy seems really stupid, but he turned in a great paper on XYZ"
TA2: "Really? I have a really good student who did a paper on XYZ too."

Whoops. This is not to mention that the vast majority of university students see nothing wrong with file sharing of copyrighted music, movies, etc. This is not a generation raised to respect copyright, so frankly, based on guilt by association and the fact that the suit has been pending for three years, I'm betting ConnectU has a case.