
Ask HN: Is it legal and ethical to repost entire HN thread to another website? - jmstfv
I want to build a website that will select one &#x27;interesting&#x27; hn thread daily and display it on the front page. I am planning to anonymize comments (strip usernames and links to them). I don&#x27;t intend to make any profit from it, although I might accept donations from readers to pay the server costs. Is it legal (and ethical) to do so?
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sdrinf
IANAL, but this has been discussed a couple of times, most prominently here:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641312](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3641312)
. Short version: comments are copyright @ their owners, HN has an implied
license to republish; other sites do not get implied license by the virtue of
commenters _not posting it there_. You will have to reach out & ask each of
the commenters directly to ask for republishing permission.

Also note, that despite advice given below by rest of the thread, legal does
not care whether you store it yourself, or pull it via API; Copyright /
republishing permissions are required for the content either way.

~~~
bbcbasic
But...

[https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:18_PMR...](https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:18_PMRrJDhQJ:https://news.ycombinator.com/item%3Fid%3D12998698+&cd=2&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=mt)

?

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maxerickson
I certainly don't want my comments republished elsewhere with my name removed
(or with my name attached for that matter).

(which brings you another issue, even if you gets lots of people agreeing with
you that it is ethical (which I guess you will not get), is it ethical to do
it expressly against the wishes of individuals?)

~~~
falloutx
So you're saying If I retweet you or embed your tweet on some other website, I
would have to ask you first?

Cause a lot of websites do that and they never ask any permissions. That would
turn the Internet into a permission hellhole. Unless your data is not
accessible it would be replicated.

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LordWinstanley
IANAL but...

I don't believe your issue would be with HN. HN is just an aggregator for
content published elsewhere, so they have no say in whether or not you also
link to that content.

As regards wanting to publish 'interesting threads', by which I assume you
mean debates in the comments; again, I wouldn't worry too much re HN
themselves. There are no T&C's to be agreed to when you register an account
here, so no-one who comments has granted HN exclusive rights to publish, or
transferred copyright on anything they write here. Nor has HN asked for, or
claimed any such rights.

So, if I hereby also grant you non-exclusive rights to publish my ill-informed
drivel elsewhere, then that's a matter between you and me. Nowt to do with HN.

Of course, in theory, this would mean that you'd have to satisfy yourself that
anyone else who comments here and whose words of wisdom you want to reproduce
is similarly amenable –and there you open a whole different can of worms, as
regards whether or not a comment published on the intarwebs, with no copyright
claimed or given, is in the public domain, or not.

I would suggest it [at least partially] is, as is borne witness to by the
common practice of reproducing other people's tweets, as practised by most
news websites.

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microtherion
What's the value added proposition for your users? User names DO matter to
some extent on HN, and why would anybody read on your site rather than the
original?

What I COULD see as a useful, ethical, and legal service would be something
akin to LWN, i.e. you publish LINKS to threads and to particularly salient
comments, and add an editorial writeup of the discussion.

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ThrustVectoring
Standard disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and this is not legal advice.

This seems like the sort of thing people would be able to sue you for. As far
as I can tell, Hacker News doesn't do anything special with copyright of
comments. As with all text you write, as soon as it becomes "fixed" by being
recorded, the author has the copyright to it. Since the author decided to
publish it in a Hacker News comment thread, that basically implies that Hacker
News has permission to copy their work and publish it in the standard ways
that it does.

Now there is the concept of "Fair Use". Hosting interesting comment threads
may or may not be "Fair Use", but either way that's the sort of thing you find
out by getting sued and seeing if it works as a defense. If you host it
without any commentary, that's less likely to qualify as Fair Use than if you
summarize stuff, say what you like about the thread, add your own commentary,
etc.

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pvaldes
Legal or not, is happening yet. I had found some of my HN comments on other
websites. They weren't neither anonym not even particularly useful or clever
comments. Just copy pasted. It seems that some people just like collecting
random data. Maybe to generate profiles.

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brudgers
For legal advice, I'd recommend speaking with an attorney familiar with these
matters. For ethical advice, the question implies that it is not an ethical
slam-dunk. The presence or absence of ethical standards are determined by such
contexts.

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cjbprime
It would not be legal or ethical for most websites. But HN might be different,
because it doesn't try to make money (so you aren't depriving it of anything
tangible by rehosting its content), and it has a public API that includes
stories (you should use it, of course) that doesn't mention anything about
republishing content being forbidden, or say that it's limited to personal
use.

Hopefully an HN moderator or similar will know the answer and reply here. If
they don't, you should email HN.

~~~
josefdlange
If you were really clever, you could just store some data structure that is
the IDs of the post and the desired comments and use the API to pull them on
page load (maybe with a nice cache layer).

In that case, you're just curating and displaying HN content without hosting
it.

