is the legal page a placeholder, do words have no meaning?
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
Mods, enforce your license terms, you're playing fast and loose with the law (GDPR/CPRA)
is the legal page a placeholder, do words have no meaning?
https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/
Mods, enforce your license terms, you're playing fast and loose with the law (GDPR/CPRA)
Which terms are not being enforced? (not disagreeing I just don't feel like reading a large legal document)
> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies
The user content is supposed to be licensed only Y Combinator and (bleah) its affiliated companies (which are many, all the startups they fund, for example).
Curious why it should be on HackerNews to enforce restrictions on content they only license from you?
If it's owned by you and only licensed by HN shouldn't you be the one enforcing it?
Seems like they are trying to do that through the stated legal intermediary (YC)
If you carry on the quote two more words:
> ... a nonexclusive
I.e. this section is talking to additional rights to the content you post to ALSO go to YC, not that YC is guaranteeing it (+friends) will be the only one to hold these rights or will enforce who else should hold the rights to your publicly shared content for you.
There's a more intricate conversation to be had with GDPR and public data on forums in general but that's wholly unrelated to what YC's legal page says and still unlikely to end up in an alarming result.
I think that's incorrect. Exclusivity would be something you grant to YC. These terms need to make sense to be valid. Claiming exclusive rights would mean they are forbidding YOU from licensing YOUR rights to anyone else.
Imagine Facebook claiming that by uploading images you are granting them exclusive usage rights to that image. It would mean you couldn't upload it to any other site with similar terms anymore.
That agreement is largely about "Personal Information", not the posts and comments.
That said, there are "no scraping" and "commercial use restricted" carve-outs for the content on HN. Which honestly is bullshit.
None that I could see:
Your submissions to, and comments you make on, the Hacker News site are not Personal Information and are not "HN Information" as defined in this Privacy Policy.
Other Users: certain actions you take may be visible to other users of the Services.
I mean, just because they say the comments are not PI doesn't make it so.
That’s a good point. I’m only referring to the terms they used in the privacy policy.
Eh, fuck that agreement. I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The AI companies seem to agree.
Then again, I'm not the guy that is going to get sued...
Legal theory about public data is fun right up until someone with money decides their ToS mean something and files suit, because courts are usually a lot less impressed by "I could access it in my browser" once you pulled millions of records with a scraper. Scrape if you want, just assume you're buying legal risk.
> I believe if you put it on the internet without an auth-wall, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it.
I agree. It's the owners of the sites that have to follow rules, not us.
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"I'm kind of old school in that I believe if you put grass on the ground without a fence, people should be allowed to do whatever they want with it. The noblemen with a thousand cows seem to agree."
And that, my friends, is how you kill the commons - by ignoring the social context surrounding its maintenance and insisting upon the most punitive ways of avoiding abuse.
Context is important, but isn’t HN’s social context, in particular, that the site is entirely public, easily crawled through its API (which apparently has next to no rate limits) and/or Algolial, and has been archived and mirrored in numerous places for years already?
Signal and information are not grass.
Grass and property require upkeep. Radio waves and electromagnetic radiation do not.
I don't want your dog to piss on my lawn and kill my grass. But what harm does it cause me if you take a picture of my lawn? Or if I take a picture of your dog?
If I spend $100M making a Hollywood movie - pay employees, vendors, taxes - contribute to the economic growth of the country - and then that product gets stolen and given away completely for free without being able to see upside, that's a little bit different.
But my Hacker News comment? It's not money.
I think there are plausible ways to draw lines that protect genuine work, effort, and economics while allowing society and innovation to benefit from the commons.
How is is he breaking gdpr here?
They already refuse to comply with CPRA, instead electing to replace your username with a random 6(?) character string, prefixed with `_`, if I remember correctly.
I know, because I've been here since maybe 2015 or so, but this account was created in 2019.
So any PII you have mentioned in your comments is permanent on Hacker News.
I would appreciate it if they gave users the ability to remove all of their personal data, but in correspondence and in writing here on Hacker News itself, Dan has suggested that they value the posterity of conversations over the law.
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