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I am not a lawyer. HN cannot apply the Creative Commons Attribution license to our comments. HN does not own our comments. We do. We are implicitly granting a

I am not a lawyer. HN cannot apply the Creative Commons Attribution license to our comments. HN does not own our comments. We do. We are implicitly granting a license to HN to store and display our comments, but we are not implicitly granting HN a right to re-license our comments. HN needs to specifically ask for our permission in order to license our comments under a CC license, just like Wikipedia does with its content. It's not enough to just say that the comments are licensed under CC. This is what StackOverflow does, and it's ridiculous. Let's not have the same thing here. I would be more than happy to license my comments under a CC license, but I would not be happy at all if someone else thought they had the right to do it for me. Conclusion: Be like Wikipedia, not StackOverflow.

modeless 16y ago
Of course HN can't retroactively relicense existing comments, and that's not what I'm suggesting.
- DanielStraight 16y ago
  What I said was not restricted to retroactively applying a license. HN cannot automatically apply a license to new content either. It was at first unclear to me how you meant for HN to apply the license. It seems clear now that the intention is that users would have to explicitly grant HN permission. This is good, and I'm all for it. It does need to be clear though that users are explicitly granting permission. And I agree with others that an opt-out is definitely a good idea.