
Ask HN: Who owns copyright to your resume? Can I limit how long companies store? - throwaway13000
Offlate, I became curious and concerned. How long can a company keep my resume? What can I do to limit them from sharing with &quot;AI&quot; companies? For example, if I send my resume to company_1, company_2 so on till company_10. Each of them separately gives my resume to AI company &#x27;C&#x27; for insights. Now, I do not want &#x27;C&#x27; to aggregate the information and tell each of these company that I have recently interviewed in 10+ places. How do I limit this aggregation of my resume? I also do not want &#x27;C&#x27; to filter me out using an old resume of mine(may be one that is two years old). How can I limit them from storing my resume for too long?
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db48x
In the US you can't copyright a list of facts, and a resume is mostly a list
of facts. You can copyright the presentation of the facts, if its sufficiently
distinctive from other presentations, but your hypothetical ai company isn't
going to keep the presentation around. They're going to copy the facts into a
database that they can query.

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ktpsns
While your local law may give you some tools (thinking of the new European
GDPR thingy), practically you cannot take influence of what is done with your
data once you publish them/give them out of hand. Best you can do is counter
misinformation by keeping an up to date CV in the web (say on your website).

~~~
wahern
> practically you cannot

Exactly.

Copyrights are ridiculously expansive, and Fair Use defenses steadily
narrowed. The reality is that the primary limiter on copyright enforcement has
always been the practicality of detection and notice. Secondarily is the fact
that in some jurisdictions, most notably the U.S., remedy is limited to an
injunction and actual damages (e.g. lost licensing fees) if the work was not
registered prior to infringement. (Because for most works, such as a resume,
actual damages can't be shown--the standards for calculating damages are
pretty strict--all you have is an injunction.)

If such technicalities were to be magically lifted there'd probably be _much_
more pressure to reduce the scope and duration of copyrights. Conversely, that
such technicalities exist goes a long way in explaining the wide scope, and to
a lesser extent long duration, of copyrights.

~~~
throwaway13000
Thanks for the detailed answer. I assumed I would be owner of my resume. Guess
there is not much I can do.

~~~
wahern
You are definitely the owner, without a doubt. As someone else pointed out,
the owner of _what_ , precisely, is up for debate, but certainly you have
copyrights in _some_ aspects of the work. From an enforcement perspective the
substantive legal questions are what rights, and especially the scope of such
rights, you implicitly granted or waived by publishing or sharing.

However, you don't really need to answer those questions before notifying,
say, a recruiter that you're exercising your rights (such as they are) and
demanding that they delete your resume. But how can you ensure compliance? For
how long are you willing to check? And if they fail to fully comply are you
willing to pay the expense to litigate, especially without the prospect of any
monetary damages, let alone damages sufficient to cover the costs of
litigation?

These limitations to enforcement at the threshold effectively moot the
substantive legal questions. Some of the legal questions may not have ever
been answered by a court simply because it's never been worth anyone's effort
to press them.

