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Comment by realce | Hacker News Reader

> HackerRank is not an automatic copyright holder of any solutions to a problem they published

That's an interesting point of view. You're saying the question text is copywrite-able but the logical conclusion of such a question is not?

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Copying the question text verbatim certainly is copyright infringement (and I would guess unlikely to be fair use, but I'm not a lawyer). If you give the problem in your own words, it won't be, just like your solution isn't.

Chegg seems to have sorted this out with textbook questions?

They license it I think.

That's not how copyright works. Simply rewording each question will still violate copyright when you're copying all of the questions. I couldn't just reword Harry Potter and republish all of the novels. Likewise, copying some small portion may fall under fair use.

That is how copyright works. I believe you are thinking of plagiarism, which isn't the same thing.

On the contrary, I’m fairly sure you could do that with the Harry Potter books. What jurisdiction are you in?

I believe (and I’m not a legal expert here), that what the commenter is alluding to is the “moral rights” over a work. This is more common in the UK and Canada. When I worked for a Canadian company (I’m a U.S. American) part of our IP release for works-for-hire included a waiver/transfer of rights specifically for the “moral” or “authors” rights, which were explained as being the “spirit” or “whole” of works we created.

It’s a legal construct, but I was never satisfied with that explanation. The gist was that while we could transform things that we learned or did, we could not re-use the ideas that formed the functioning product in other works elsewhere, even by transformation.

Doesn’t the Berne convention specifically make moral rights inalienable? The whole point being that you may transfer redistribution rights, etc. to somebody else, but they still don’t get to (affirmatively) claim they wrote it (thus can’t even try to pressure you to allow it)? Am I misunderstanding or is the local (and likely original) definition of “moral rights” different from the one in the convention?

Giving the problem "in your own words" raises the question of whether or not your restatement constitutes a derivative work.

From the 1976 Copyright Act section 101:

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/101

> A "derivative work" is a work based upon one or more preexisting works, such as a translation, musical arrangement, dramatization, fictionalization, motion picture version, sound recording, art reproduction, abridgment, condensation, or any other form in which a work may be recast, transformed, or adapted. A work consisting of editorial revisions, annotations, elaborations, or other modifications which, as a whole, represent an original work of authorship, is a "derivative work".

The same way you may copyright a writing prompt, but you won't automatically get copyright to stories inspired by said prompt

Seems to me that’s the simplest and most intuitive point of view. Can you imagine publishing a question and then owning the copyright to every answer to it someone writes!?

There is a difference between "Questions" and "test questions with a known specific solution". One could argue (I would not) that the solution to a test question is an integral part of the question and therefor if the one can be protected by copyright, so can the other".

Is there any legal basis for that argument?

Nope

While that would apply to simple maths questions — 16x16 is always 256 — I don’t see that applying to HackerRank programming challenges, where the challenges (last time I used it) are essentially “produce correct output from this mostly-secret input”, and they don’t even mind which language you use to do this, never mind what variable names you use.

At least in this case, there can be multiple correct answers using different approaches, in that case your theory leads to further confusion.

It such a question exists, surely it is the exception that proves the rule.

Not in the least. Copyright applies to creative expressions, not functional expressions. My solution to your problem is my creative expression, not yours.

If only because you could get the answer wrong.

Both a question and an answer may or may not be subject to copyright. What GP is saying is that such rights, if any, are assigned to their respective authors.

The solution is certainly copywritable, but not by hackerrank as they did not author it

I think (or at least hope) that copyright is limited to a specific expression of a specific solution. Anything more broad would be tantamount to a copyright on basic algorithms, I think.

And what happens when there are multiple different possibilities for the solution? As is the case here, the solution can be achieved in multiple ways. It would be bizarre for one to have copyright claim over all of them.

My initial reaction to your question was that I thought perhaps Hackerrank could claim copyright on any particular solution that had either been written by Hackerrank or where the copyright had been assigned to it.

With regard to the latter, I would guess, knowing how corporations work, that Hackerrank requires anyone taking a test to assign her rights, with respect to any solution given, to the company. (To be clear: I do not like that at all.)

In the US, the Copyright Act of 1976 extended copyright to unpublished works (Hackerrank presumably does not publish its own solutions, though it might well register them.) IANAL and AFAIK, I think there are fairly stringent requirements on fidelity for a work to be considered infringing, and there is also the matter of fair use, but in practice in this case, it is Github, not the courts, that Hackerrank has to persuade.

I would guess that publishing something that advertises itself as a solution to a Hackerrrank problem might fall under trademark infringement or some such law, and something stating the particular problem being being solved might be an infringement of a copyright on the problem as stated by Hackerrank.

> I would guess that publishing something that advertises itself as a solution to a Hackerrrank problem might fall under trademark infringement or some such law,

Trade secret, rather. In fact, given the questions are supposed to be unpublished, those would more properly fall under trade secret law as well (except that the DMCA doesn't apply to trade secrets or any other form of IP other than copyright).

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