Nearly every one of your Medium posts could be interpreted as a copyright violation. Copy pasting text and calling it a "curation" doesn't give you the right to publish others' works without their permission.
The idea is to give people who just want to quote a line or two leeway to do so, while punishing those who would take someone else's work en masse and publish it under their own name.
> https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/urhg/
knows no concept of fair use - you can easily get sued if you use even a little snippet of a copyrighted work (and often are).
Only in some very specifically defined cases short quotes are allowed:
Most citations or reasonable quotations fall under fair use, but reproducing an entire work (and/or modifying it) fall under copyright infringement.
http://waxy.org/2011/12/no_copyright_intended/
> How pervasive is it? There are about 489,000 YouTube videos that say “no copyright intended” or some variation, and about 664,000 videos have a “copyright disclaimer” citing the fair use provision in Section 107 of the Copyright Act.
[snip]
> On YouTube’s support forums, there’s rampant confusion over what copyright is. People genuinely confused that their videos were blocked even with a disclosure, confused that audio was removed even though there was no “intentional copyright infringement.” Some ask for the best wording of a disclaimer, not knowing that virtually all video is blocked without human intervention using ContentID.
The point is, people understand plagiarism, and they universally think it to be wrong. People want copyright law to enforce that social norm, not understanding that plagiarism isn't something the law cares about; copyright law is somewhat related, but it is mostly orthogonal to it, and there's no other law which even defines the concept. Therefore, people try to magic up a new copyright law which does what they think it should, and are honestly shocked when their forms of words are worthless. After all, real lawyers use forms of words to do things, so why shouldn't my magic be similarly efficacious?
Yeah, silly people. Remember email in the early 1990's? It was clear that copying email messages from disk to memory, and memory to frame buffer, constituted copyright "copies". And that no implicit grant of permission existed. So after Berne, unless there was an explicit grant in an email, copying it from disk to screen was a copyright violation. Various organizations attached footers to outgoing emails stating the terms under which they could be used, but most didn't. And yet silly, silly people - they just ignored the legalities and continued reading their emails each morning. It's like they thought they could just do something reasonable, establish a societal norm, and copyright law would eventually adapt to it. Silly people. Oh, and forwarding, without distribution right! And display, without performance right. And more recently, Pinterest! So, people have been confused for decades. So many people just don't understand how the law works, and how it evolves.
Even in the short term, "nonsensical disclaimers" might impact 5-factor fair use decisions.
And consider the scientific community. Massive ignorance of, and disregard for, the letter of copyright law. There is instead a different social norm, built on acknowledgement. Are those "nonsensical disclaimers"?
Even when creation of law is corrupt, and especially when enforcement of law is corrupt, societal norms do matter.
Perhaps one might usefully examine the youtube copying and "nonsensical disclaimers" as a semi-aware form of civil disobedience?
But if you ignore the technical legal points, am I really harming anyone by posting 75% of Paul Graham's essay on medium. It's definitely providing value to all of the people on Medium who wouldn't come across it normally, and Paul Graham isn't losing any valuable traffic or sales from this.
So really what's the harm? Just because precedents have been set in cases involving much more monetary risk doesn't mean that what I'm doing is harming anyone. In my opinion, it's helping.
> In my opinion, it's helping.
Have you talked this over with Paul Graham (the copyright holder)? Because if you have, and he agreed that it was fine for you to post this to Medium then you are NOT violating copyright law. On the other hand, if you DIDN'T ask him, then YOU are assuming for yourself the right to decide whether this is or isn't "harming anyone" without asking Paul.
Perhaps he is in the middle of negotiations with an advertiser for his site who knows that it has valuable old essays that can't be found on places like Medium. Or perhaps Paul counts on old essays to help establish his reputation, even though he doesn't directly make money from them. These are unlikely, but my point is that YOU DON'T KNOW.
This isn't a case of "ignoring the technical legal points", it is a case of "directly violating the law"! And for good reason -- I may quibble with the length of copyright, but I strongly believe that the basic rights granted by copyright are mostly correct in this situation. I think it SHOULD be up to the author to decide where to publish it and where not to.
Good news though. Even if you DIDN'T get Paul's permission before publishing, copyright law is flexible enough that you may STILL be OK. Specifically, it is not a crime to violate copyright, so you can't be sent to jail over this and you can't be prosecuted by some overzealous District Attorney. Instead, Paul (the copyright holder) has the right to sue you. If he's feeling nice (which he probably is) then he won't.
But stop just copying people's stuff. It's not OK, both legally AND (in my opinion) morally.
The earlier submission makes Hacker News worse because it is low quality. That is the relevant harm here. It is why the community flagged the earlier submission. If that isn't compelling, maybe the high number of the comments here that are unrelated to Graham's essay (like this one) might be.
[1]: It is also inconsistent with the guidelines which favor original sources.
1. By using his work without permission, you risk misrepresenting his message. For example, you might accidentally remove a key passage or quote or citation. After all, you say "Below are (in our opinion) the essential excerpts" - I have a feeling he wouldn't agree.
2. He almost certainly prefers to have his work consolidated in a single place (he has a distinctive style), for any number of reasons (branding, analytics, ability to remove and/or edit, etc.)
3. At the end of the day, it's his property.
I think it's easy to think "these laws don't really make sense here, because of [foo] reason", but it's nonsensical to do so without asking for pg's permission. You risk looking like you knew that he wouldn't be ok with it. If you really intended to help him, just ask.
You are freeloading on PG's insight and fame, trying to increase yours at his expense. Even if the expense is relatively trivial, it's no less true.
If it were actually OK, you would have already asked PG if it was ok for you to hack up his articles and re-publish them under your name.
Come to think of it, why don't you ask him directly, and see if he thinks it's ok, or what conditions he'd put on it?
Let us know how that conversation goes.