Ask HN: Is what Open Commonplace legal? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Is what Open Commonplace legal?

I have been building https://opencommonplace.com/ for over a month. Simply said, it is a platform for people to post book notes and people to read them at the will. That allows you to gain wisdom of books without reading the entire book.

As I am building this thing, I was just wondering if putting all the notes online for free really legal? Just wondering!

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I don't think you need to worry.

The cynic in me thinks there's no worry because I am struggling to imagine who would use this. I mean, who is your target market?

Who cares enough about a book to read other people's notes, while not reading the book? High schoolers? Book Club members?

And who is going to the effort to write notes and share them publicly? People who want discussion with other people who haven't read the book?

If you were building community around those who had read a book, and wanted to discuss it; that at least makes more sense. But I'm also pretty sure I don't want to hang out with the kind of person who would love a site like that.

I get it, I read a lot, and this is a site for non-readers, so I'm not your target market.

Back to the legal question, let's assume for the moment, that you build a community. What exactly is your legal concern? Copyright? I assume you aren't posting the whole book right? Other than providing book downloads I'm not sure what legal issues you expect to encounter?

So basically, what wikis like Wikipedia are doing already, except as a service?

I'm not a lawyer, but I don't think this seems like something that would hit any legal issues, at least not as described. It's not illegal to write a plot summary of a piece of fiction, otherwise most wikis and media journalism would be banned.

The legal issue you may actually encounter is people quoting too much of the original book in their notes, or copying it outright. The summary on the back of a book is copyrighted, and I can see someone uninterested in writing just copying it wholesale.

So, you'll probably be fine. Just need a way to report plagiarised/stolen content to deal with the folks that think notes mean copying the source material wholesale.

You also will have to handle people using your site to store other content.

For example, how do you guarantee the notes are describing the book and not, say, posting ads, discussing drug deals, posting pornography, mentioning things that are illegal in some countries (exchanging notes on books about various historical events could easily be illegal in some countries, for example)?

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