Full Hacker News database for download (posts, comments, points, date, username)
Am I really the only person who has dubious feelings about this? I contribute my words to HN, where they can be seen in context and where they are viewed by the same community that I am interacting with. I don't contribute them for arbitrary other uses off the site.<p>Unless I have missed something, posters who submit their comments here do not automatically release them into the public domain. In fact, I have seen no legal statement anywhere about transfer of copyright as a condition of posting, so it's not clear that posters give anyone any rights at all, other than probably the operators of HN an implicit licence to publish them on the site and visitors to HN an implicit right to read them while browsing the site in the normal way. That would make downloading and sharing the entire HN database in this way an obvious infringement of the copyright of every poster here.<p>Sorry if this seems a bit OTT, but some of us watched many comments we contributed to the community in the Usenet days being appropriated by long-term Usenet archives that then republished them out of context, covered in advertising, with comments/ratings attached to them that aren't open to the rest of the Usenet community, etc. That is basically profit-making on the back of others' work without their knowledge or consent, and potentially at the expense of the community the poster originally wished to support, and I have a problem with that.