Ask HN: How are HN user comments licensed? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How are HN user comments licensed?

15 pointsrapnie9 comments

IANAL and as such I am unsure how the comments on HN may or may not be used, quoted and attributed elsewhere. What is the license that applies, or did I just overlook the obvious answer?

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> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.

See the legal link at the bottom. There is more, about 2/3 the way down.

Yes, it tells me I should hold the copyright to what I post here and that HN can do anything with it forever afterwards, and that packaged in a whole bunch of legalese. It does not tell me with what license it is available to others. Given that everyone is reusing HN content in their own sites I'd be inclined to think that they have the same extensive rights. But that's just my guesswork.

If someone reusing your HN comments on another site matters to you, hire a lawyer.

If it doesn’t matter to you, then it doesn’t matter to you.

The privacy policy establishes that ycombinator can make our comments part of their site content.

The Terms of Use establish that readers can read the site and that's about it:

> [...] you agree not to modify, copy, frame, scrape, rent, lease, loan, sell, distribute or create derivative works based on the Site or the Site Content, in whole or in part, except that the foregoing does not apply to your own User content...

Let me get this straight. Y Combinator claims the right to assemble a compendium of all of my comments, change 20% of them to include offhand remarks about how much I despise gays and Muslims and adore poor grammar and Microsoft, title it "The Wisdom and Folly of dTal", bind it in hardback, and sell it? Movie rights too?

Yes, and this is essentially the same set of rights that all social media platforms claim over user content.

Yes, that’s how much internet communication works.

No because that would be defamatory (I assume).

You may have moral rights preventing them to do that : https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moral_rights

As a Frenchman my moral rights are inalienable but I’m not sure I could realistically force HN to respect them because the European court probably has more important tasks.

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