Comment by ButlerianJihad
2 days ago
Creating a clone is basically violating all copyrights of every commenter and contributor here on Hacker News. We could all get together and inundate you with DMCA takedown for our Intellectual Property. We still retain copyright and all rights to our User Content, while we've granted YC a non-exclusive license to it. Scraping and cloning is also a violation of HN's TOS.
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
It's not your content, and you're cheating us all!
Are there somewhat popular social networks that require commenters and posters to license their work under a free license (e.g. CC-BY-SA-4.0)? Then anyone would be free to create a "clone" of the website and even make derivatives, all without breaking copyright law.
There are many wikis like this (e.g. Wikipedia) and at least one forum (trisquel.info), but I don't know of anything for more general purposes. Even most fediverse sites, which implicitly grant permission for some specific kinds of mirroring, don't usually have a free license that allows redistribution in completely different contexts, as far as I know.
YouTube lets users select license for their video uploads, and Creative Commons Attribution is one of the available choices but not the default. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797468?hl=en
PeerTube also lets users specify license for the videos they upload, including many different Creative Commons licenses. Administrators can configure default license values for videos uploaded to their specific PeerTube server since last year. https://joinpeertube.org/news/release-7.3
The only issue I imagine with defaulting to a Creative Commons or other kind of permissive license is that the users uploading content might be unaware or not properly understand what it means, if they themselves did not actively opt in to use that particular license.
You'll be able to claim your account on the site and then set yourself to "redacted" so that your content doesn't show up on it. (The claiming process is fun: I generate a 6 digit number, you put it in your HN profile, and then you get a link to reset the account password and sign in: https://i.imgur.com/OYaFZOI.png)
Certainly not trying to cheat anyone here. You ever make a model train set? It feels fun like that. Obviously it's not the real HN and I don't claim it to be. Suggestions welcome.
Part of the point of this is to offer an extended API that shows downvotes/flagged/collapsed/dupe/etc, all stuff the official API doesn't cover.
Making it opt-out instead of opt-in is shitty. Here's a better idea: don't disrespect the hackernews users in the first place.
How is archiving content disrespectful toward the creators of the content? Are you also going to sue the Internet Archive?
I mean no disrespect. The site simply wouldn't work without it. HN has a million users or so.
Opt out is the best compromise I can offer. Without it, no site is possible.
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> You ever make a model train set?
Yes I have, but for some reason I did not go to Union Pacific railyards and pry metal sidings off of the rolling stock. Nor did I siphon diesel fuel out of the locomotives! FFS!
When you do that, the locomotives lose diesel and I gain diesel. When I copy a comment nothing is lost (except an insignificant amount of HN's performance, which I'm working with Dan to make sure to stay in bounds of).
It's open source. The point of open source is that you have a lit candle and I have an unlit one. Lighting mine with yours doesn't extinguish your flame; there are now two flames.
The site will eventually offer an extended API that shows content that the official API doesn't, like downvotes and [flagged] status. It's partly why I made it, since there was no way to see flagged comments without visiting HN directly.
3 replies →
I'm copying your comment for my wall of false equivalences.
Is that true? I Don't think they'll delete your posts if you ask iirc. They just anonymize the username
> We could all get together and inundate you with DMCA takedown for our Intellectual Property
The same morally repugnant scummyness X is currently engaging in?
> It's not your content, and you're cheating us all!
You haven't been cheated in any way lol. You're posting to a public forum, grow up.
I have a serious question because I'm not aware of what your talking about.
What the heck is the open API for if not to do this exact thing?
Why do they make it available to anyone? What are even the legitimate use cases of using the API?
HN offers a publicly available API. Obviously using it (and by extension creating tools and applications that use user and comment data) is within their terms of service, there have been many, many such posted here over the years. YC doesn't have a problem with them as long as they aren't commercial and don't violate YCombinator's brand. But even then I've seen a few projects get real close to the line without consequences.
I don't think you understand what a "non-exclusive license" is.