The thing is, anybody could just use a crawler and get the data directly from HN. Downloading the bittorrent is just a shortcut. Since you published your comme

The thing is, anybody could just use a crawler and get the data directly from HN. Downloading the bittorrent is just a shortcut. Since you published your comments here, I think they are free for everyone to consume. Now to republish them somewhere else is a different matter. I guess publishing a torrent could be counted as republishing the data, but what would be the point in refusing it? The publisher is not making any money from it.