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Comment by weinzierl | Hacker News Reader

I never understood how attribution worked on Stackoverflow anyway.

    1. I post something to SO and the terms say it is CC-BY-SA. 
    2. Someone uses my post and properly links back to SO.
       SO's terms require this.

Shouldn't the attribution primarily mention me, the author of the post? How can a link back to SO be required as attribution for my content? It's not that I assigned my copyright to SO, I just posted my CC-BY-SA content on their site. SO is just the middleman.

I'm OK with attributing SO and I don't doubt the terms are legally clean. I just goes against my understanding of CC-BY-SA. as well as the new SO MIT attribution construction.

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I'm no expert, but I read them as saying only that attribution is required, and a link to your SO answer counts as attribution. Presumably the user is also free to provide attribution without an SO link, assuming they satisfy CC-BY-SA.

They say that attributions should mention the author of the post, and also did so before? Or are you arguing against mentioning SO at all? It would be interesting if that part would be enforceable.

https://blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required/

    Or are you arguing against mentioning SO at all?

Not really arguing against that because I think it's fair. Playing devil's advocate I can't see how it is legally justified though.

    It would be interesting if that part would be enforceable.

Yes, this is the interesting question.

Attribution doesn't necessarily need to be a name or contact information. It just has to help end users identify the provenance of a work of intellectual property. A URL does that. Many end users are already including URLs in their code to indicate where they found a snippet - compliance with the new terms is already somewhat socialized. That's a big reason we chose these terms. We spoke at length with the Open Source Initiative about using a URL as attribution, and they agreed it works in our case.

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