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Comment by jrockway | Hacker News Reader

Another site that rips off the HN comments verbatim?

Hi everybody, I'm doctor copyright-infringement!

That's Disqus (YC S07). Its "reactions" piece pulls in comments from sites like HN, Reddit, and Digg into the comments widget it puts on a given blog post.

Bleh. It looks pretty useless without threading.

EDIT: By threading, I mean conversation threading; this isn't a misplaced comment about the performance of La Brea.

I concur. I've never really found it useful.

It's useful in that it lets you know that there's a conversation going on somewhere else when you're looking at the comments on the page. It might be enough to say, ``active conversation as of x [unit of time] ago over here: [link]''

I see. Does HN say somewhere that "anything you submit can be used for commercial purposes by YC startups"?

Interesting point, I googled for 'who owns copyright blog comments' and found this (Google cache, the site itself is down):

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:6GfoIFr...

I'd like to hear if anyone else agrees or disagrees with this article (it seems to be a bit of a grey area).

I think it was when talking to Jonathan from Plagiarism Today (http://www.plagiarismtoday.com) that I was told that forum posts should be regarded as the authors' own, legal copyright property. I may have some old notes on this around that I can dig up.

Some forums (and sites like YouTube) write some Terms of Use/EULAs to waive their content rights to the site owners (not for any nefarious reasons), although I doubt that these "agreements" hold up.

If I had any comments or forum posts that were copied verbatim in a manner that upset me, I would definitely pursue it legally. But I'm a fanatic like that.

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