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Comment by math-dev | Hacker News Reader

Is this legal (is there an explicit license allowing redistribution)?

There's no redistribution happening. Running code on my pc to download and view content from a copyright holder's website is commonly called “browsing the web”.

Edit: strike that, the “example output” is in fact a complete copy of the intended output, not just a stub. They should probably clear that with the author or remove it.

Yeah. It just goes against the spirit of the internet to take someone’s blog and package it up as a GitHub repo without their explicit approval.

The GitHub only contains a csv with links to the blog, so it seems to respect Paul's request.

The have a releases page that contains the final epub

I'm using the same RSS that Paul explicitly shared on his website created by Aaron Swartz [1].

[1]: http://www.paulgraham.com/rss.html

When someone uses the “But my HTTP requests!” defense, they’re either being intentionally obtuse, really do believe they’re in the right, or both.

This isn't redistribution. It's a tool to download it for your own personal use. If this is illegal then so is using Firefox to browse the web page (It also fetches the content for your own personal use).

If you redistribute the generated epub, that's a different issue of course (though that is just as possible to do with copy-paste or saving the html in a browser). Don't ban tools for their misuse.

The code is not redistribution. The csv is not redistribution.

graham.epub and graham.mobi in the root of the project is very much redistribution.

https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays/blob/main/graham.epub

https://github.com/ofou/graham-essays/blob/main/graham.mobi

You're right, I missed those. OP should probably remove those from the repository (and those on the releases page), just to stay in the clear.

I'm sure PG wouldn't mind, these essays are in public domain under his blog.

They are not in the public domain.

Well it’s not explicitly disallowed.

http://www.paulgraham.com/gfaq.html

> Can I mirror an essay on my site?

> I'd rather you linked to it instead.

Well, the author’s preferences should be ideally followed IMHO.

> I'd rather you linked to it instead. I like to keep track of which ones people read, because it gives me ideas of what to write about next. I also like to be able to fix typos.

https://web.archive.org/web/20140701175447/https://www.ycomb...

  Legal

  TERMS OF USE

  When you click on a link, our server will send you the corresponding page.

That is for YCombinator though (and also says all items are copyright YC if I read it correctly - not sure how hacker news falls into that).

The absence of a copyright or license notice implies full rights to the author

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_notice

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