I made an E-book compiling the best of r/personalfinance | Hacker News Reader

I made an E-book compiling the best of r/personalfinance

blog.bankonjuno.com

23 pointsankitkumar9848 comments

You've taken a bunch of other people's copyrighted work, formatted it as a PDF, and then ask for money for it... on your company's website? That's so weird. I get maybe dipping into Reddit to have a couple of blog posts that show up in search results, with the goal of getting people to click through to your products or whatever, but actually asking for money for the e-book is a new one.

My main takeaway is that if I walked into a Juno Bank branch, the teller would be happy to give me a pen to fill out the application, but would first ask "need a pen? name your price." The pen would then have a Chase logo on it, since they got it from the bank across the street.

Hi, Ankit here. You can choose to not pay for it as well.

If you read the blog carefully, we have mentioned it very clearly- "(Pro Tip: Type in '$0' in the price bar below and you can have the magazine for free. At Juno, we'll never charge fees )"

Are you going to address the rest of his comment?

You cannot take Harry Potter bookes 1–7, put them together as an ePub, and put it on your website for sale with an option to put $0. You cannot even put them for free on your website. Why? Because it is copyrighted. Reddit comments are copyrighted too. Without authors' permission, what you are doing is illegal.

EDIT:

Those posting content on Reddit retain the rights to their content. They give Reddit a license to do certain things to their content, but this license is solely to Reddit, not the general public.

If you want to do what you do legally, you have to ask for permission of every single person whose content you have included in your ebook. Depending on the jurisdiction, you probably can legally compile a list of links to interesting content and publish that, but certainly not the contents themselves.

Now I am questioning whether this kind of disregard for copyright goes further than the ebook. For example, does your software use GPL code without complying with GPL?

In the author's defense, that's not an accurate analogy at all - see the comment regarding Reddit's TOS below.

Hi, We have attributed each post to its user by linking it to the original thread. And if you think of it, a lot of original content from Reddit is shared around, we have just done that :)

> We have attributed each post to its user by linking it to the original thread.

It is still not legal. You can attribute Harry Potter to J. K. Rowling all you want. It still won't make it legal to republish her books.

> if you think of it, a lot of original content from Reddit is shared around, we have just done that

Businesses are held to a higher standard that random strangers with pseudonyms on the internet. For one, unlike 14-year-olds on twitter, a bank is supposed to have its metaphorical legal shit together.

If an organization does not understand and comply with such widely-known laws as copyright, what are the odds that they understand and comply with thousands of obscure laws and regulations pertaining to financial institutions? Will it be just a matter of time until a regulator knocks on your door, does an audit, and learns that the company has violated dozens of laws and needs to be shut down immediately?

I would be very concerned about trusting my money with a financial institution who seems to have a tendency to skirt, bend, and outright break the laws.

> I would be very concerned about trusting my money with a financial institution who seems to have a tendency to skirt, bend, and outright break the laws.

You mean like all of them? You seem to have some kind of axe to grind.

Yeah, it all seems very weird to me. You're one DMCA notice from a random redditor away from having your entire website shutdown.

In general, you can't republish someone else's writing unless you get the permission from the author, or they publish it under a permissive license. Posting to Reddit does not put something in the public domain.

In your example, you could just add one extra page which critiques the entire series and that would fall under fair use. You could literally put “After reading these books it’s shit and the writer is a hack”. Totally fair game.

Fair use is not that simple, and the original authors would most likely win a suit against such a "critique".

Typically the defense of fair use would apply to a work that excerpts from a larger work. Copying the original work in whole is going to be very hard to justify.

Fair use is like a guilty plea. You're saying "yes I violated the authors copyright, but I should be allowed to." Then a judge decides if you're right. They use a test, and much of the criteria is a spectrum. However commercial use is more binary. You charge for something, you lose points.

Is this work transformative?

No, not at all. There are very clear very specific cases of what constitutes fair use in the written word case such as a book. Look it up.

Although this is excellent, never substitute someone else's tips for your own financial literacy.

Example: Many sites will have lists of best credit cards to have. Often they don't take into account your personal circumstances.

For some, Bank of America likely has the best Credit Card available if you are a Platinum Honors tier member (>$100k combined across all accounts). With this tier, their Premium Rewards card gives me 2.62% cashback on every single purchase. I get 5.25% casback on Gas using their Cash Rewards card.

Don't many of those sites also receive an affiliate commission?

I actually bought this book and then realized it was literally copy-pasted list of posts with zero commentary, context or value-add. The money was inconsequential and was refunded but I find it weird that the company would do this. Even more bizarre that the employees are defending it on HN. Their understanding of copyright law, ethics and plain decent behavior seems severely lacking. Banks are supposed to be super conservative when it comes to correct behavior because money, law and the feds but....

I would rather trust Comcast than these folks for banking....okay maybe not but you get the gist.

Do you have permission from the reddit users to include their content in your book?

We have attributed each post to its user by linking it to the original thread :)

That's something you might be able to get away with as a blogger out journalist, but I'd not put that on my institutional website as marketing material - and then charge for it.

You're skirting the question every time it's asked.

The question is whether you have obtained permission from each individual whose original work you have copied.

No. This is called copyright infringement. Get a lawyer or take it down -- what you're doing is against the law.

I do not understand the smiley at the end of your sentence.

Is this a joke and you did not actually mention these people (not that it changes anything copyright wise)?

Or are you telling us how smart you are when doing illegal things?

I really do hope a DCMA brings your website down, you may then understand that when you are kindly told that you are stealing things, it is worthwhile to listen and not answer bullshit.

Waiting for someone to compile an E-book with the best investment advice from /r/wallstreetbets

Buy High, Sell Low

Do you need epub or pdf?

Actually it would be more like: "Fuck you retard. Open Robinhood, type in random letters and buy until you max out your CCs/"

Can not fill the Captcha showed because it is embedded in a too small frame.

Hi, Ankit here. Try once again perhaps? Might be a one time error.

it was fine on the 2nd try. I downloaded the ebook.

Why are you even giving people the option of paying for this?

Why are you complaining about it when it says "Name a fair price:" in the price field? Work went into compiling and laying this out, so, why shouldn't someone be able to easily pay for that if they want?

It's literally other people's content copy-pasted in a "book". Even "free" (you still need to enter an e-mail address) that's not a great way of generating content (I guess you could argue there is some marginal value in selecting 50 "good" posts?), taking money for it is pretty slime-y.

Then don't buy or exchange your email for it? I'm not sure why you feel the need to tell the rest of us how to morally evaluate this optional e-book. I traded my email for it and my morals weren't violated in the slightest.

Are you planning on competing with the product or do you just want to see that person fail for no particular reason?

I just gave an answer to a question asked.

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.”

I mean I’m not a good man so the quote kind of falls apart but you get the idea.

I would agree with you if it were not possible to pay $0. But, there was work that went into compiling and laying this out, and that does add some value. I see no problem with offering this content on this basis, for the price of an email address, especially considering you can use a throwaway address.

There is no fair price for selling the work of others that you don’t have the rights to take.

And you know they don’t have those rights?

Wouldn’t they have made it clear if they did? Isn’t that traditionally how using someone’s work under a license works?

Did you ask them?

I can't respond for the OP of course, but I can tell you this: he put work in it.

He did the job of two fine respectable professions: the editor and the designer. That's worth something, even when he didn't write the content.

However, he does not own the content or have a license to redistribute or sell it, and compiling it into an ebook to sell is clearly outside of fair use doctrine.

Did he have the permission of either Reddit or the author of those comments?

It would seem it's not necessary:

"By submitting user content to reddit, you grant us a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, unrestricted, worldwide license to reproduce, prepare derivative works, distribute copies, perform, or publicly display your user content in any medium and for any purpose, including commercial purposes, and to authorize others to do so. (emphasis mine)

> of either Reddit

they'd need at least.

True. After re-reading it, it's clear that I can't take content, but Reddit could authorize me to; Reddit's permission is still necessary.

The question was not "it is right to take money" but, "why would OP come up with the idea of taking money".

The big question is: did he ask permission to each person who contributed to this? One thing is to have your words in a web site, another is to have them included in a ebook that someone else is profiting off.

IP theft issues notwithstanding, how many of these 50 great tips assume that the reader is American?

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