[thenewnewguy]

You did, although I have no idea if OP is an affiliate of YC (IANAL but maybe you could argue the public API is a form of sublicensing the data?):

> By uploading any User Content you hereby grant and will grant Y Combinator and its affiliated companies a nonexclusive, worldwide, royalty free, fully paid up, transferable, sublicensable, perpetual, irrevocable license to copy, display, upload, perform, distribute, store, modify and otherwise use your User Content for any Y Combinator-related purpose in any form, medium or technology now known or later developed.

[lolinder]

> IANAL but maybe you could argue the public API is a form of sublicensing the data?

Given that the license is explicitly identified as both sublicensable and transferable and includes the right to distribute, I have a very hard time seeing how anyone could argue that the recipient of data that YC explicitly exposes through their "Official HN API" isn't allowed to use it.

[GeoAtreides]

> Y Combinator and its affiliated companies

My data is licensed only to Y Combinator and its affiliated companies (I would have prefer it to be licensed it only for news.ycombinator,com), not any other rando that can access it via a browser or an API

[daemonologist]

Sematic (OP's employer; rebranded to Airtrain?) is a YC company. Not a lawyer but I assume that would be included in "affiliated" since YC presumably has some ownership of them.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/airtrain-ai

[GeoAtreides]

Welp, there it is then.

If they are YC affiliated, nothing I can do.

But I do feel saddened and personally betrayed; I thought the licence I gave to YN was just for news.ycombinator.com to store and show my comments, not for any other purposes.

Silly, silly me.

[senordevnyc]

All HN did do was store and show your (public) comments.

What this other company did with that (public) data seems to me to be a separate issue that you should take up with that company, just like the fact that your public comments (which you explicitly gave permission to HN to show) have been indexed by Google, Bing, and probably thousands of other spiders, bots, scrapers, etc.

I'm curious how you expected this to work. Like if you only give HN permission to store and show your comments on the public web, then somehow no other entity out there will be able to do anything with them?

[GeoAtreides]

Yes, I expect it to work in the same way instagram works, for example. If a commercial entity started yoinking photos from instagram and using them for commercial purposes, shit will hit the fan.

Again, the fact my user data has been scrapped already doesn't mean it was scrapped legally. I'm ok with HN showing my comments, I'm not ok with anyone else than HN using my user data.

[averageRoyalty]

> ommercial entity started yoinking photos from instagram and using them for commercial purposes, shit will hit the fan.

Will it though? I would imagine Meta would block them and then posture with a C&D or a frivolous lawsuit, but if they share the phones you gave them on the public internet, they're publicly consumable right? What law do you feel is broken there?

[shadowgovt]

Shit hits the fan because Instagram considers user content a golden goose, and they have a vested interest in not letting it get outside their control. Not because they feel a particular obligation to protect user privacy. That's generally been status quo for every social network.

HN cares a lot less; they're a tech comment site and don't actively discourage people using the dataset gleanable from the contents of the site for novel experimentation.

(Sidebar: I see "scrapped" coming up a lot in these conversations these days. Where is that neologism coming from? I'm familiar with people calling it "scraping" but it seems like the term has drifted for some reason?)

[foota]

Anyone could (in a technical sense) scrape HN or access the data through the API and do whatever they want with it. It's unclear to me whether the license granted to HN by your use of the site gives someone doing so license to your comments (I suspect not but IANAL) but the general argument here is that this would fall under fair use. Certainly that seems the case if they didn't display the dataset itself. I'm not sure how it would fair though given they are displaying the content.