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Ask HN: Is it legal and ethical to repost entire HN thread to another website?
I want to build a website that will select one 'interesting' hn thread daily and display it on the front page. I am planning to anonymize comments (strip usernames and links to them). I don't intend to make any profit from it, although I might accept donations from readers to pay the server costs. Is it legal (and ethical) to do so?
- brudgers 10y agoFor legal advice, I'd recommend speaking with an attorney familiar with these matters. For ethical advice, the question implies that it is not an ethical slam-dunk. The presence or absence of ethical standards are determined by such contexts.
- cjbprime 10y agoIt would not be legal or ethical for most websites. But HN might be different, because it doesn't try to make money (so you aren't depriving it of anything tangible by rehosting its content), and it has a public API that includes stories (you should use it, of course) that doesn't mention anything about republishing content being forbidden, or say that it's limited to personal use. Hopefully an HN moderator or similar will know the answer and reply here. If they don't, you should email HN.
- josefdlange 10y agoIf you were really clever, you could just store some data structure that is the IDs of the post and the desired comments and use the API to pull them on page load (maybe with a nice cache layer). In that case, you're just curating and displaying HN content without hosting it.
- LordWinstanley 10y agoIANAL but... I don't believe your issue would be with HN. HN is just an aggregator for content published elsewhere, so they have no say in whether or not you also link to that content. As regards wanting to publish 'interesting threads', by which I assume you mean debates in the comments; again, I wouldn't worry too much re HN themselves. There are no T&C's to be agreed to when you register an account here, so no-one who comments has granted HN exclusive rights to publish, or transferred copyright on anything they write here. Nor has HN asked for, or claimed any such rights. So, if I hereby also grant you non-exclusive rights to publish my ill-informed drivel elsewhere, then that's a matter between you and me. Nowt to do with HN. Of course, in theory, this would mean that you'd have to satisfy yourself that anyone else who comments here and whose words of wisdom you want to reproduce is similarly amenable –and there you open a whole different can of worms, as regards whether or not a comment published on the intarwebs, with no copyright claimed or given, is in the public domain, or not. I would suggest it [at least partially] is, as is borne witness to by the common practice of reproducing other people's tweets, as practised by most news websites.
- sdrinf 10y agoIANAL, but this has been discussed a couple of times, most prominently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641312 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641312 . Short version: comments are copyright @ their owners, HN has an implied license to republish; other sites do not get implied license by the virtue of commenters _not posting it there_. You will have to reach out & ask each of the commenters directly to ask for republishing permission. Also note, that despite advice given below by rest of the thread, legal does not care whether you store it yourself, or pull it via API; Copyright / republishing permissions are required for the content either way.
- bbcbasic 10y agoBut... https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:18_PMRrJDhQJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D12998698+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=mt https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:18_PMR... ?
- maxerickson 10y agoI certainly don't want my comments republished elsewhere with my name removed (or with my name attached for that matter). (which brings you another issue, even if you gets lots of people agreeing with you that it is ethical (which I guess you will not get), is it ethical to do it expressly against the wishes of individuals?)
- falloutx 10y agoSo you're saying If I retweet you or embed your tweet on some other website, I would have to ask you first? Cause a lot of websites do that and they never ask any permissions. That would turn the Internet into a permission hellhole. Unless your data is not accessible it would be replicated.
- ThrustVectoring 10y agoStandard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice. This seems like the sort of thing people would be able to sue you for. As far as I can tell, Hacker News doesn't do anything special with copyright of comments. As with all text you write, as soon as it becomes "fixed" by being recorded, the author has the copyright to it. Since the author decided to publish it in a Hacker News comment thread, that basically implies that Hacker News has permission to copy their work and publish it in the standard ways that it does. Now there is the concept of "Fair Use". Hosting interesting comment threads may or may not be "Fair Use", but either way that's the sort of thing you find out by getting sued and seeing if it works as a defense. If you host it without any commentary, that's less likely to qualify as Fair Use than if you summarize stuff, say what you like about the thread, add your own commentary, etc.
- microtherion 10y agoWhat's the value added proposition for your users? User names DO matter to some extent on HN, and why would anybody read on your site rather than the original? What I COULD see as a useful, ethical, and legal service would be something akin to LWN, i.e. you publish LINKS to threads and to particularly salient comments, and add an editorial writeup of the discussion.
- pvaldes 10y agoLegal or not, is happening yet. I had found some of my HN comments on other websites. They weren't neither anonym not even particularly useful or clever comments. Just copy pasted. It seems that some people just like collecting random data. Maybe to generate profiles.