what about copyright?
Therefore, a submission or comment posted online would be protected by copyright provided that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. The copyright would belong to the author and not to the site on which the comment or submission is posted. This is why many terms of use for sites that invite third-party submissions, comments, etc. provide that, in making a submission, a third party assigns all copyright to the owner of the site, who is then free to use the material as he likes without further say from the submitter. Without such terms of use, the submitter (i.e., the author) would retain the right to object to any other use being made of the submission besides the post itself as submitted by that person.
Two major doctrines modify the above.
First, by making the submission, the author of the comment gives at least an implied license for display on the site and for incidental copying that goes along with it.
Second, fair use might allow otherwise copyrighted material to be quoted in limited ways.
Given the above, I believe permissions would be needed to re-publish in magazine format any comments or other materials that reflect any degree of creativity. The magazine sounds like a great idea, though, and the problem is likely more logistic than anything, as I assume few if any contributors would not give permission if asked.
HN lacks an API, but a decent web scraper (like BeautifulSoup) should be able to walk the DOM and grab the top threads.
Depending on space restrictions in the print edition, this could comprise:
* All comment threads with a score above some threshold;
* Only the top thread;
* The best one-third of comments;
etc.
That said, I do feel this "Hack Monthly" project should play nice and respect comment "owners".
Any owner of rights can give such rights up in part while still retaining ownership of the materials by giving a license to someone else to use such materials for specified purposes. For example, I might submit an article to a journal under terms where I retain the copyright while giving them a license to publish the article once in their journal.
With comments, there is no express license involved but rather an implied one. If I have impliedly agreed that the site can display my comment under its customary policies, the law treats that as an implied license (i.e., an implied granting of a permission) for the site owner to display such comment under its customary terms and, if such terms include a practice by the site owner of making such submissions irrevocable, I impliedly agree to that as well when I make my submission.
The law can get murky in these areas but this is a basic analysis of how you can retain ownership while still giving up certain rights to the site owner.
My own personal attitude when I post something is that I don't own it. Since I lose most controls associated with traditional ownership, it helps me sleep better to not draw a fine legal argument and just assume I don't really own my comments. But of course, I don't post anywhere but HN, so I also make an assumption about pg and the community's attitude of what is the right thing to do.
I would ask PG to change the TOS of hacker news, to allow you do this. I think he'd like it, so he may be willing.
Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange. Asking contributors to also allow the site owner to re-use their contributions for other purposes crosses a line for me.
> And what effect might this have on the people willing to comment?
You incorrectly (to my mind) assume that this is a major problem for most people. I think there won't be any effect. People don't read T&Cs, though we make it explicit in them that we do this.
This isn't like Facebook changing their T&Cs. This is publicly posted information, not private correspondence between friends. That would be very different.
> Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange.
That's not the exchange, just your perception of it.