You haven't licensed the material so it's copying or possession by you is an illegal act in most jurisdictions. Your awareness of the nature of the content and its licensing status establishes intent.
Of course, if you don't redistribute it you shouldn't have any problems (at least in the US) because an IP address alone isn't sufficient to pursue someone in court here.
IANAL, but if you dont have plans to do anything evil with it, steal github's customers, etc (and havent made any promises to github to keep things secret) i think you could argue that making a copy for research purposes is fair use.
If you were collecting public documents in bulk and had concrete plans that you could articulate, sure. I suppose the same might even apply to bulk collection of pirated content as well, although I'd certainly want to run that one by a lawyer before depending on it.
I really don't think any of that applies here though. This is an isolated leak of materials which you very clearly do not have any rights to access, copy, or possess in any manner whatsoever. I just can't see how "research purposes" helps you here. (Unless you happen to be an established researcher with an ongoing project that involves surveying source code leaks over time, perhaps? But again, you'd really need to consult a lawyer before doing something like that.)
Disclaimer: not a lawyer, do not actuslly follow this as advice. Yadda
> This is an isolated leak of materials which you very clearly do not have any rights to access, copy, or possess in any manner whatsoever
I think that's backwards - you don't need the right to posess something, you need to make sure that nobody has the right to stop you from posessing it. The default state in the absence of someone else's right interfereing is information gets to be free. So the question is, are you violating any of github's rights if you download the code for "personal research" or curiosity?
As far as copyright/fair use goes, the fact its a leak doesn't seem that applicable to me - you do not need permission from the copyright holder for fair use to apply (in fact that would defeat the entire point of fair use). "Research" might apply here, because in the united states you can basically ignore copyright if its for research purposes (although there is a lot of fine print on that and its really complicated). In particular, if your personal research is non-commercial and unlikely to affect github's bottom line, it further increases the liklihood fair use applies.
Personally i think trade secret law is more appropriate than copyright here, but afaik that only applies to people who have a responsibility to keep github's code confidential. I don't think that applies to randoms on the internet who are just curious what github's source looks like.
You haven't licensed the material so it's copying or possession by you is an illegal act in most jurisdictions. Your awareness of the nature of the content and its licensing status establishes intent.
Of course, if you don't redistribute it you shouldn't have any problems (at least in the US) because an IP address alone isn't sufficient to pursue someone in court here.