For something to be copyrightable, it must be an "original" work of authorship that is fixed in a tangible medium of expression. 17 U.S.C. § 102(a). A leading copyright treatise states that a work is "original" if it is "independently created by the author" and possesses "at least some minimal degree of creativity." Nimmer on Copyright, §§ 2.01[A], [B].
Therefore, a submission or comment posted online would be protected by copyright provided that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. The copyright would belong to the author and not to the site on which the comment or submission is posted. This is why many terms of use for sites that invite third-party submissions, comments, etc. provide that, in making a submission, a third party assigns all copyright to the owner of the site, who is then free to use the material as he likes without further say from the submitter. Without such terms of use, the submitter (i.e., the author) would retain the right to object to any other use being made of the submission besides the post itself as submitted by that person.
Two major doctrines modify the above.
First, by making the submission, the author of the comment gives at least an implied license for display on the site and for incidental copying that goes along with it.
Second, fair use might allow otherwise copyrighted material to be quoted in limited ways.
Given the above, I believe permissions would be needed to re-publish in magazine format any comments or other materials that reflect any degree of creativity. The magazine sounds like a great idea, though, and the problem is likely more logistic than anything, as I assume few if any contributors would not give permission if asked.
Ideally it should be decided by an editor, but that costs time and money. For something more automated, Hacker News already ranks comment threads by some measure of quality so the good stuff ends up on top and the obnoxious/otiose one-liners drop to the bottom.
HN lacks an API, but a decent web scraper (like BeautifulSoup) should be able to walk the DOM and grab the top threads.
Depending on space restrictions in the print edition, this could comprise:
* All comment threads with a score above some threshold;
Although I would like to agree with you, I'm not sure its clear that the commenter is the owner. If I am the owner of my comments, I should be able to delete them anytime I wish and not based on pg's time window for retracting a comment, right? I should be able to delete my entire profile and all comments and have push button access to deleting any cached version (google) as well...which I cannot do. U.S. law does not provide clear protections for this sort of thing. So the commenter being the owner in any tradition meaning of "owner" does not apply.
That said, I do feel this "Hack Monthly" project should play nice and respect comment "owners".
See my comment below in this thread about why the commenter is normally the owner of comments having some minimal creativity absent terms of use that assign the rights to the site owner.
Any owner of rights can give such rights up in part while still retaining ownership of the materials by giving a license to someone else to use such materials for specified purposes. For example, I might submit an article to a journal under terms where I retain the copyright while giving them a license to publish the article once in their journal.
With comments, there is no express license involved but rather an implied one. If I have impliedly agreed that the site can display my comment under its customary policies, the law treats that as an implied license (i.e., an implied granting of a permission) for the site owner to display such comment under its customary terms and, if such terms include a practice by the site owner of making such submissions irrevocable, I impliedly agree to that as well when I make my submission.
The law can get murky in these areas but this is a basic analysis of how you can retain ownership while still giving up certain rights to the site owner.
What about comments? Without them a lot is lost. Also, I know some authors won't give you permission, and thus that means you won't be reproducing the 'best of' hacker news. No thanks.
I think it's fair to say that pretty much any decent ideas has about a dozen impossible brick walls preventing it from succeeding, which in hindsight become less important.
Maybe just express the sentiments(text analysis) of the replies if they arent giving you permission. I think that is better, since alot of content is generated here.
On newstilt, we've written the terms of service so that we can publish comments. We said that by posting you give the service permanent, non-exclusive, transferable rights to edit, modify, distribute, etc, the content.
I would ask PG to change the TOS of hacker news, to allow you do this. I think he'd like it, so he may be willing.
And what effect might this have on the people willing to comment?
Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange. Asking contributors to also allow the site owner to re-use their contributions for other purposes crosses a line for me.
We feel the exchange is that journalists serve their communities, and the communities help them earn a living. Using the comments off site helps that goal.
> And what effect might this have on the people willing to comment?
You incorrectly (to my mind) assume that this is a major problem for most people. I think there won't be any effect. People don't read T&Cs, though we make it explicit in them that we do this.
This isn't like Facebook changing their T&Cs. This is publicly posted information, not private correspondence between friends. That would be very different.
> Comments add value to a site, making it attractive to advertisers. That's the exchange.
That's not the exchange, just your perception of it.
Therefore, a submission or comment posted online would be protected by copyright provided that it possesses at least some minimal degree of creativity. The copyright would belong to the author and not to the site on which the comment or submission is posted. This is why many terms of use for sites that invite third-party submissions, comments, etc. provide that, in making a submission, a third party assigns all copyright to the owner of the site, who is then free to use the material as he likes without further say from the submitter. Without such terms of use, the submitter (i.e., the author) would retain the right to object to any other use being made of the submission besides the post itself as submitted by that person.
Two major doctrines modify the above.
First, by making the submission, the author of the comment gives at least an implied license for display on the site and for incidental copying that goes along with it.
Second, fair use might allow otherwise copyrighted material to be quoted in limited ways.
Given the above, I believe permissions would be needed to re-publish in magazine format any comments or other materials that reflect any degree of creativity. The magazine sounds like a great idea, though, and the problem is likely more logistic than anything, as I assume few if any contributors would not give permission if asked.