Comment by MichaelBosworth
4 days ago
What expectation of confidentiality are you ascribing to people having posted publicly accessible opinions on the internet?
Out of curiosity, is your point about TOS out of concern for the poster or for Goodreads?
My expectation isn't of confidentiality, but of attribution. Sure, my website is perfectly accessible on the internet, and I'm fine with being able to find it on google, but if you pipe it into an algorithm that will start throwing out stuff based on what I wrote, with zero reference to me at all, I'd get a bit annoyed. This website has taken the combined output of probably thousands of people, shoved it into an algorithm and is then using their work to give "original" ideas. If one person wanted their content removed from the system, how would you do that?
What does that comment have to do with confidentiality?
That he viewed a review on Goodreads as the reviewer’s intellectual property hadn’t occurred to me. I see why, in aggregate, many such opinions become valuable, but the whole is more than the sum of its parts.
So does it feel to you guys like your comments, say, here in this Hacker News thread should be considered effectively copyrighted as your personal IP?
If so, do you feel the same way about opinions you share out in a supermarket or on the street?
Of course comments are copyrighted, if they happen to contain text that is novel. As an example, in the reddit TOS, they require commenters to license their comments to reddit.
> If so, do you feel the same way about opinions you share out in a supermarket or on the street?
Well being novel isn't the only criteria for copyright, the work must also be "fixated", and opinions in a supermarket usually isn't (but they can be, if I film them and post on reels or something; then the video itself is copyrighted)
https://copyrightalliance.org/education/copyright-law-explai...
> Fixation
> To meet the fixation requirement, a work of authorship must be fixed in a tangible medium of expression. Protection attaches automatically to an eligible work the moment the work is fixed. A work is considered to be fixed so long as it is sufficiently permanent or stable to permit it to be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated for a period of more than transitory duration.
There are well established legal standards for what is copyrightable and I believe written literary criticism trivially qualifies (as it should). Stuff you yell at the supermarket doesn't, IIUC, as it isn't fixed in a tangible form. Social media comments are, IIUC, generally protected. The exception would be comments that don't meet the bar to be considered "original", "creative", etc.
(not a lawyer)