Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

Comment by smnrchrds | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

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?

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

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.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com