[moralestapia]

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.

@zX41ZdbW, you can safely ignore this guy.

@GeoAtreides, next time read the actual terms of service before hallucinating.

[codingdave]

> for any Y Combinator-related purpose

That is actually the key phrase. HN can provide the API, no problem. People can consume the API, no problem.. But I'd ask an attorney if API consumers can then re-release the data for purposes not related to YC. By my reading, they cannot.

[moralestapia]

You might want to read it again, then:

https://opensource.org/license/mit

[codingdave]

That is about the software, not the data.

[moralestapia]

While a literal reading of the MIT license refers to "software", many datasets have been released under it.

In particular, if someone releases something that is only a dataset along with an MIT license file, the most reasonable interpretation is that the rights holder intended to release the data under the terms of that license.

I looked for copyright cases involving this specific distinction, whether "data" versus "software" makes a legal difference, but didn’t find anything.

So the question remains open (for you, for me it's pretty clear the dataset is released under MIT).

You might want to sue and find out. It sounds like an interesting experiment.

[nairboon]

What exactly is released under MIT license?

[GeoAtreides]

>Y Combinator and its affiliated companies

is zX41ZdbW either?

[moralestapia]

Oh, now I see my comment might be a bit harsh.

I didn't consider you might now know about:

https://github.com/hackernews/api

[GeoAtreides]

yes, and per HN terms and conditions only YC and YC affiliated (as you quoted) can use the api legally. I don't license my content to anyone else and so it shouldn't be use by anyone else, even if it's available on a free-for-all API (nice move HN, btw).

[moralestapia]

https://github.com/HackerNews/API/blob/master/LICENSE

It's right there, you just have to click the link I shared ...

[GeoAtreides]

that's the license for the API, not the content/data the API serves

[jupr]

>including without limitation the rights to use

'use'...arguably the sole purpose of the API is to fetch the data.

You are grasping at straws.