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I'll admit to always being a little confused about this point with reference to StackOverflow. It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, s

by dtparr 11y ago

I'll admit to always being a little confused about this point with reference to StackOverflow. It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, self-contained bits of code. How is answering the question not giving an implicit license to use that answer? Are your answers really so substantive that licensing it seems appropriate? Should I not accept your answer if my question is about proprietary projects so that I can wait for someone with a different license preference to come along and give me an answer I can use? I suppose I've always looked at SO as devs helping devs, almost like a virtual coworking space. If the guy next to me is having trouble, and I look over and help him solve the issue, I'm not then going to go "oh, and btw, I'm going to need some attribution, and you're only allowed to use my solution if your project meets my criteria."

DanBC 11y ago
> It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, self-contained bits of code. What happens if I scrape SO so I can print and sell a book?
- johnlbevan2 11y ago
  You get a poorly written book which no one buys because they can get the content for free online.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  Collections are covered by copyright. So even though a recipe is not copyright-able, a book containing recipes is. One of the reasons you will see recipes filled with many paragraphs of filler is that it then becomes a literary work which is covered by copyright. Having said that, I would be surprised if the majority of code in SO is generally copyright-able. If I ask a question, "How do I initialise an object in C++" and the answer is a few lines of code, I do not think that this is a copyright-able work. It is a technique. Even if the code is long enough to be copyright-able, I don't think using the technique would be considered a derived work. Whatever the case, scraping portions of SO would be a copyright violation since it is a collection.
  - LoSboccacc 11y ago
    you still can do that and attribute it somewhere. doubly so with this change, since they require a link and it could be a qr code on the margin (not that I'd buy that book, still..)
wnissen 11y ago
Furthermore, there are numerous court cases that say that, e.g., letters to the editor may be printed in the newspaper, even the absence of any explicit permission. IANAL, but I'd be really surprised if there's any license or attribution required.

by dtparr 11y ago

DanBC 11y ago

> It's a question and answer site that generally involves small, self-contained bits of code. What happens if I scrape SO so I can print and sell a book?

johnlbevan2 11y ago
You get a poorly written book which no one buys because they can get the content for free online.
mikekchar 11y ago
Collections are covered by copyright. So even though a recipe is not copyright-able, a book containing recipes is. One of the reasons you will see recipes filled with many paragraphs of filler is that it then becomes a literary work which is covered by copyright. Having said that, I would be surprised if the majority of code in SO is generally copyright-able. If I ask a question, "How do I initialise an object in C++" and the answer is a few lines of code, I do not think that this is a copyright-able work. It is a technique. Even if the code is long enough to be copyright-able, I don't think using the technique would be considered a derived work. Whatever the case, scraping portions of SO would be a copyright violation since it is a collection.
- LoSboccacc 11y ago
  you still can do that and attribute it somewhere. doubly so with this change, since they require a link and it could be a qr code on the margin (not that I'd buy that book, still..)

wnissen 11y ago

Furthermore, there are numerous court cases that say that, e.g., letters to the editor may be printed in the newspaper, even the absence of any explicit permission. IANAL, but I'd be really surprised if there's any license or attribution required.