Let’s say you find a subreddit with a very interesting guide that contains no private information.
What’s the legality of copy / pasting that text over here? And if it is reworded, manually or with chat gpt?
The assumption here is that it would be done manually without scraping.
Edit: it looks like Reddit does not help the copyright and there wouldn’t be massive issues if we created a community to copy over posts with useful guides and tutorials. I can’t create it since I’m not on lemmy.world and wouldn’t have time to moderate it, but I would contribute if a community like that existed.
This isn’t a college course, and I doubt any random person on the internet is going to sue you.
Why don’t you just copy paste it wholesale and just give them credit? Don’t pretend it’s your own work.
I’m just trying to determine whether this could cause problem for instance owners.
Since it seems that Reddit does not hold the copyright we might want to have a Lemmy community where we can post such guides and tutorials, giving attribution.
Lemmit.online exists
Yes, but lemmit simply posts new stuff in chronological order. I’m talking about re-posting the countless good guides and tutorials so that searching on Lemmy can give better results.
Not a lawyer but I know a little bit!
So the Reddit user agreement (Effective June 19, 2023. Last Revised April 18, 2023) says:
- Your Content The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.
By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
What this means (I think) is that while reddit is forever allowed to use whatever you posted in any way, even selling and monetising it, the author retains copyright of their post/comments. So if you copy/paste something over from reddit, the author can claim copyright infringement, but not reddit.
Please don’t treat this as legal advice!
Thank you so much!
Also not a lawyer, but I cannot recall a single instance of an online text post being the catalyst of a copyright lawsuit. AFAIK, there are deliberate steps one must take in order to protect their intellectual property. Please correct me if I’m wrong.
It says nothing about copyright. There’s a different between author rights and copyright. Reddit license IS a copyright, but you still retain author rights.
The difference between the two is simple. Author right is a right to say that some work of art was made by you and no one else. Copyright is a right for others to reproduce your work. The way it works is kind of simple too. You wrote a book and you’re its author. No one can claim otherwise. But then you want to see it printed, so you go to a publisher and pass copyright to them. Now you own author right and publisher owns a copyright. That results in a situation that publisher can print as many books as they wish and wherever they wish. And you can claim that you wrote them. And if the contract between you two is not good, you might not even get a penny out of it, lol. And you can’t go to another publisher, because you don’t have copyright anymore.
How could Reddit sell your content if you have copyright over it? You could immediately sue Reddit in that case.
[email protected] is a community that reposts noteworthy Reddit posts onto the Fediverse so you presumably wouldn’t have any issues as long you’re giving credit to the OP.
Omg, thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for.
Glad I could help 🙂
Notalawyer but I say copy everything. Strip the bones of reddit like a school of piranhas for anything useful (do credit original authors when possible). Fuck that Steve guy for hamstringing one of the most ubiquitous knowledge repositories since the Alexandria Library
It is crazy that we live at the same time as that failure. He legit owns that embarrassing title. His parents must be proud they created that. Lol
Which title? Greedy Pig Boy? Or Official Moderator of r/jailbait?
Lawyer or not, it doesn’t matter. Your laws aren’t my laws. It’s the internet. You can copy anything you want.
The hell?
99.99% of content on reddit is stolen. What do you think something like /r/WhitePeopleTwitter is about if not content theft from another large platform, with first come, karma served. No one, not a single person there, is ever even concerned with wether or not permission was requested and granted. Heck, not even guides are safe from this. Go visit /r/piracy, and check their wiki. Think of how cool, useful and well formatted it is. Appreciate it for a bit, right before being informed that even this was initially copied nearly verbatim from another online resource. One that, ironically, is banned from being posted on Reddit.
It’s a link aggregator, that’s the category of website it falls under.
And so is this one.
Steal and credit. Link the original directly if you feel too bad. Reword after research, but do it manually if it concerns you. You will be doing more than due diligence. Because if no one ever stole, we’d basically have no content.
A significant amount of subs were text only. I get the majority of Reddit was memes, pics, videos and linking to content off site, but there’s still a wealth of text only posts covering thousands of niche topics.
🤷, as long as you give attribution, it doesn’t matter in my opinion.
Credit content creators, link to original sources, and frame your copypasta as an analysis (like you’re citing specific areas of text to add to it in some way). You could even group together various related posts on a subject as a comparative piece.
Who cares? Just post it. The knowledge is what’s important, not some rando author’s karma count.
According to the Reddit terms of service, the person that posts the content owns the copyright. So Reddit itself can’t make you take it down. The person that wrote it could since they hold the copyright.
The legal thing to do would be to ask permission from whoever wrote it.
I wonder if this means I can sue Reddit for copyright violations on all the comments in my now deleted account that were rolled back?
I clicked the delete button, and the site confirmed they were in fact deleted. They shouldn’t be allowed to rollback content that I own the copyright to.
You gave them a license to do so:
"You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content. "
No potential issues, unless the text itself is illegal in some way.
I mean it’s the same as finding information for homework. Find it and rewrite it in your own words.
Hopefully also bringing together more than one source.
Most of Reddits content is stolen off of Reddit. Then the reposted Reddit content is stolen by buzzfeed.
Everything in the world is legal unless someone goes to court over it.
The posts are still protected under copyright, the easest solution here is to just link to archive.org and have their legal team handle any problems.
If it’s on Reddit and visible via Google search, it’s public information. Posts online generally do not have any sort of ownership or protections legally.
I could copy your post and repost it somewhere else, I could even claim it as my own post and idea, with zero legal ramifications. Though taking credit for it would make me a dick. I’d just credit the original user. Even if it’s just “crosspost from Reddit user /u/insertUsername”
Absolute rubbish. They’re copyrighted like anything else you write.
From the reddit GTCs:
You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:
When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.
The legality isn’t a question that can really be answered, because there’s no precedent for copying things from one forum to another, and it’s very unlikely that you’re going to get sued because there’s no money involved here. The OP from the reddit post isn’t making money from that post, and you’re not making money from copying it.
Ethically, I think it’s fine if you’re diligent about citing your sources.
Also what’s legal for one isn’t legal for another. And what’s illegal for one is totally fine for another. See: American cannabis laws. I don’t even use it, but it’s hilarious that it’s illegal there.
I have seen many stack overflow clones that copy the question and all the answers and pretend to be fresh content.
Users content is owned by the users, Reddit’s TOS just gives them an unrestricted license to use it. So in theory, you would need the user’s permission to copy it elsewhere, but who the fuck would do that?
IE: giver, buddeh
