Ask HN: legality of re-using publicly posted material

2 points by ulfstein 17 years ago | 2 comments

I recently set up a site which collates After Effects expressions and scripts (http://xscriptorium.com). At the time of building I conceived only of one scenario: the person submitting an expression is also the author of that expression. As it turns out, the community has come up with another scenario: posting expressions that were written by others. Now, that obviously makes this site a lot more useful when it comes to collating this content but I'm wondering what the copyright and etiquette issues are? A lot of this will, I guess, revolve around where these expressions are sourced - a lot of the time expressions are posted on the After Effects mailing list, in answer to requests for a particular expression.

So now I'm wondering what I should do? Is it legal?

Any feedback would be appreciated.

ryanmahoski 17 years ago |

If you encourage or openly tolerate the sharing of copyrighted materials, that is considered illegal and you can be sued for it. To be safe, discourage such activity. Instruct the community to post their own scripts or scripts they know to have been shared in the open - and then trust your community members to do the right thing. In a large community, you can't possibly police everything. So follow the YouTube example. If a developer or lawyer claims to own a script that one of your members is thought to have illegally posted, censor the file and inform the member. Ban repeat offenders.

tstegart 17 years ago | |

Yeah, if you're polite about it people will understand. I don't think you'll have too much of a problem if you think up solutions before hand. So instead of waiting for it to happen, write down now what you will do, what you will say to people if the wrong script is posted, and make sure you're very consistent about it.

Also, remember, if someone's script is posted without permission they might be mad, but there is always the possibility they would have posted it themselves. So every time you're contacted about a script it wouldn't hurt to say: "We're sorry your script got posted. We'll take it down immediately. A lot of people found it really useful, would you consider putting it back up under your own name?"