Ask HN: Who owns copyright to your resume? Can I limit how long companies store? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Who owns copyright to your resume? Can I limit how long companies store?

Offlate, I became curious and concerned. How long can a company keep my resume? What can I do to limit them from sharing with "AI" companies? For example, if I send my resume to company_1, company_2 so on till company_10. Each of them separately gives my resume to AI company 'C' for insights. Now, I do not want 'C' to aggregate the information and tell each of these company that I have recently interviewed in 10+ places. How do I limit this aggregation of my resume? I also do not want 'C' to filter me out using an old resume of mine(may be one that is two years old). How can I limit them from storing my resume for too long?

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In the US you can't copyright a list of facts, and a resume is mostly a list of facts. You can copyright the presentation of the facts, if its sufficiently distinctive from other presentations, but your hypothetical ai company isn't going to keep the presentation around. They're going to copy the facts into a database that they can query.

While your local law may give you some tools (thinking of the new European GDPR thingy), practically you cannot take influence of what is done with your data once you publish them/give them out of hand. Best you can do is counter misinformation by keeping an up to date CV in the web (say on your website).

> practically you cannot

Exactly.

Copyrights are ridiculously expansive, and Fair Use defenses steadily narrowed. The reality is that the primary limiter on copyright enforcement has always been the practicality of detection and notice. Secondarily is the fact that in some jurisdictions, most notably the U.S., remedy is limited to an injunction and actual damages (e.g. lost licensing fees) if the work was not registered prior to infringement. (Because for most works, such as a resume, actual damages can't be shown--the standards for calculating damages are pretty strict--all you have is an injunction.)

If such technicalities were to be magically lifted there'd probably be much more pressure to reduce the scope and duration of copyrights. Conversely, that such technicalities exist goes a long way in explaining the wide scope, and to a lesser extent long duration, of copyrights.

Thanks for the detailed answer. I assumed I would be owner of my resume. Guess there is not much I can do.

You are definitely the owner, without a doubt. As someone else pointed out, the owner of what, precisely, is up for debate, but certainly you have copyrights in some aspects of the work. From an enforcement perspective the substantive legal questions are what rights, and especially the scope of such rights, you implicitly granted or waived by publishing or sharing.

However, you don't really need to answer those questions before notifying, say, a recruiter that you're exercising your rights (such as they are) and demanding that they delete your resume. But how can you ensure compliance? For how long are you willing to check? And if they fail to fully comply are you willing to pay the expense to litigate, especially without the prospect of any monetary damages, let alone damages sufficient to cover the costs of litigation?

These limitations to enforcement at the threshold effectively moot the substantive legal questions. Some of the legal questions may not have ever been answered by a court simply because it's never been worth anyone's effort to press them.

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