2y ago

What's the legality of copy/pasting or rewording interesting guides and resource posts from Reddit?

Let's say you find a subreddit with a very interesting guide that contains no private information.

What's the legality of copy / pasting that text over here? And if it is reworded, manually or with chat gpt?

The assumption here is that it would be done manually without scraping.

Edit: it looks like Reddit does not help the copyright and there wouldn't be massive issues if we created a community to copy over posts with useful guides and tutorials. I can't create it since I'm not on lemmy.world and wouldn't have time to moderate it, but I would contribute if a community like that existed.

29 comments

This isn’t a college course, and I doubt any random person on the internet is going to sue you.
Why don’t you just copy paste it wholesale and just give them credit? Don’t pretend it’s your own work.
- I'm just trying to determine whether this could cause problem for instance owners.
  Since it seems that Reddit does not hold the copyright we might want to have a Lemmy community where we can post such guides and tutorials, giving attribution.
  
  Lemmit.online exists
Who cares? Just post it. The knowledge is what's important, not some rando author's karma count.
Credit content creators, link to original sources, and frame your copypasta as an analysis (like you're citing specific areas of text to add to it in some way). You could even group together various related posts on a subject as a comparative piece.
Most of Reddits content is stolen off of Reddit. Then the reposted Reddit content is stolen by buzzfeed.
Everything in the world is legal unless someone goes to court over it.
The hell?
99.99% of content on reddit is stolen. What do you think something like /r/WhitePeopleTwitter is about if not content theft from another large platform, with first come, karma served. No one, not a single person there, is ever even concerned with wether or not permission was requested and granted. Heck, not even guides are safe from this. Go visit /r/piracy, and check their wiki. Think of how cool, useful and well formatted it is. Appreciate it for a bit, right before being informed that even this was initially copied nearly verbatim from another online resource. One that, ironically, is banned from being posted on Reddit.
It's a link aggregator, that's the category of website it falls under.
And so is this one.
Steal and credit. Link the original directly if you feel too bad. Reword after research, but do it manually if it concerns you. You will be doing more than due diligence. Because if no one ever stole, we'd basically have no content.
- A significant amount of subs were text only. I get the majority of Reddit was memes, pics, videos and linking to content off site, but there's still a wealth of text only posts covering thousands of niche topics.
  
  🤷, as long as you give attribution, it doesn't matter in my opinion.
!archive@lemmy.world is a community that reposts noteworthy Reddit posts onto the Fediverse so you presumably wouldn’t have any issues as long you’re giving credit to the OP.
- Omg, thank you. This is exactly what I was looking for.
Notalawyer but I say copy everything. Strip the bones of reddit like a school of piranhas for anything useful (do credit original authors when possible). Fuck that Steve guy for hamstringing one of the most ubiquitous knowledge repositories since the Alexandria Library
- Lawyer or not, it doesn’t matter. Your laws aren’t my laws. It’s the internet. You can copy anything you want.
- It is crazy that we live at the same time as that failure. He legit owns that embarrassing title. His parents must be proud they created that. Lol
Users content is owned by the users, Reddit's TOS just gives them an unrestricted license to use it. So in theory, you would need the user's permission to copy it elsewhere, but who the fuck would do that?
IE: giver, buddeh
The posts are still protected under copyright, the easest solution here is to just link to archive.org and have their legal team handle any problems.
Unless a post contains a license that states otherwise, I think reposting their content should be fine.
Obligatory I am not a lawyer
Why would you want to?
- So the useful information is available here?
  
  Reddit has been archived places other than Reddit
I mean it's the same as finding information for homework. Find it and rewrite it in your own words.

29 comments