3 ms·
It's not entirely clear that you can even claim copyright over trivial online comments. Trivial or not, you have copyright in your own writings, online or off-
by tokenadult 12y ago
It's not entirely clear that you can even claim copyright over trivial online comments.
Trivial or not, you have copyright in your own writings, online or off-line. Each participant on HN owns the copyright in the written expression of his or her comments. Similarly, a photographer has copyright in photographs taken by that photographer. See a user profile of a high-karma HN participant
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=tptacek
for an example of asserting copyright in HN comments, something that any of us could do, because the copyright is already there under modern copyright law, and asserting the copyright openly and publicly helps battle infringement.
- nitrogen 12y agoThere is the complication that photographs of 2D works of art intended to represent the original are not subject to copyright, so some of those photos might not be either if someone with enough money wanted to press the issue. (Not a lawyer)
- dublinben 12y agoA work must be creative enough to earn copyright. Most tweets would not qualify, for example. You can assert anything you want without it being legally enforceable.
- jacquesm 12y agoGood luck enforcing such a claim. The damages part will be especially interesting.