Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

Honest question, should services that host user generated content be obligated to provide that content "for free" through APIs or scrapers? On one hand, users created the content "for free" for the platform to use and monetize. On the other hand, providing the content through an API without any ad/monetization potential doesn't make good business sense.

Is there an acceptable threshold of free viewing before it becomes abusive? (Think, getting a single free See's candy from the store vs. employing an army of people to source thousands of pounds of chocolate treats.)

With the Reddit API issue I'm honestly unsure where I stand. I love(d) Apollo and want it to succeed, but Reddit is doing the work and not getting the rewards. Where do you draw the line at "fair"?

No because the user generating the content isn’t a virtue of any sort. They’re just doing free work for a company. If they choose to do that, that’s their choice.

In fact I think this is good. It makes it very clear that no, it’s not your content and no, you don’t deserve any rights just because you feel like you own it. Twitter will do as it pleases with “your” content.

I would very much welcome a far more informed environment where people were forced to face the details of IP rights and what it means to post content on these services.

You own the copyright to your own tweets. When you tweet you give Twitter a license to display the tweet, but you still own it. This is all spelled out in the Twitter terms of service.

Well I guess we’ll work out two things very quickly:

1. Is it worthwhile giving free labour to these services by generating their content,

and,

2. Do we want to login and/or pay to check user generated content?

Personally, I think the answer will be no. If these services generated their own content, which we actually value, then it would be a different matter. But they don’t, so if they put up road blocks I suspect they will get a bit of a shock to learn they aren’t actually as vital to society as they thought they were.

No one's obligated to do anything. All else being equal, people prefer convenience. If the service is less convenient, less people will choose to use it. If the content is freely available, it will be scraped.

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