Ask HN: What copyright should I assume for HN comments? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: What copyright should I assume for HN comments?

6 pointssveme4 comments

Some of the stories in HN comments are worth keeping or citing in articles or posts.

Say I saw a comment that I would really like to quote on my website, how would you like to be referenced? Should I ask for permission? Use the comment and link to it and its writer? Is there a general copyright (CC or something like that) guideline for HN comments?

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It is the case that every comment is copyrighted by its original author. This is actually a big deal, because it is not entirely clear that (for example) someone is allowed to republish a comment thread in an altered form (like a book or magazine) without individually clearing the copyright to every comment.

You can do so if it is "fair use", for purposes such as criticism or education, but some reproductions are not "fair", and yet would still be quite useful.

Getting permission to reproduce a comment is often not that difficult – they have little commercial value once they've been posted online for free by their author, and they were presumably intended to be promulgated to a worldwide audience – provided the commenter is alive, has a contact address posted, and responds to that contact address. Unfortunately, none of these things are true in the long run, and the bitrot sets in surprisingly quickly.

(It would be fun, for values of "fun" used by actuaries, to figure out how many comments a thread needs to have and how old it needs to be in order to have a greater than 50% chance of one of the commenters being deceased. If only I didn't have to get back to work.)

If an author dies the right to manage her copyrights passes to her heirs. If you are incredibly lucky the author took the trouble to explicitly name a "literary executor" in a will, and that executor will be a single person who has been informed of the author's wishes and is happy to play ball. Most of the time we are not so lucky. The copyrights of many famous authors are firmly in the hands of their worst enemies. The rights to other works are distributed among a score of descendants and will probably never be sorted out.

This is why copyrights need to expire in a reasonable time. Unfortunately, they no longer do.

All things written which include non-trivial expressive content are copyright of their original writers, absent some other factors not present here. You have a legal right to quote judiciously for the purpose of commentary. Many individuals on the Internet consider it good netiquette to provide a link to the source of quotes, both for attribution and to allow your readers to examine the quote in context.

The general practice of news media outlets when citing HN threads (this happens!) is "A user named $USERNAME commented on [Hacker News|an Internet forum|an Internet forum for hackers] that ..." I have yet to see one provide a link.

Thanks for your answers.

I guess I'll proceed like this from now on:

(1) if I use only a small snippet of a comment, I'll reference both the comment and the author

(2) if I use (nearly) the entire comment, I'll try to contact the author and present him the text and how its comment is used. The only issue in this case is that critical commentary might not be accepted.

One additional argument for contacting/informing the original author is that it is simply nice and encouraging to see one's contributions making waves, something that will be much harder to hear about if the comment is only linked to.

> Should I ask for permission?

That depends. If you use the entire comment or a substantial percentage of it, and if the use isn't accompanied by your own comments as part of an analysis or critical essay, then yes -- because that's not "fair use".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fair_use

> Is there a general copyright (CC or something like that) guideline for HN comments?

The general copyright rules apply, nothing special for HN.

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