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.
thanks grellas. As always, you provide clear and professional understanding for us laymen.
My own personal attitude when I post something is that I don't own it. Since I lose most controls associated with traditional ownership, it helps me sleep better to not draw a fine legal argument and just assume I don't really own my comments. But of course, I don't post anywhere but HN, so I also make an assumption about pg and the community's attitude of what is the right thing to do.
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;
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.
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.
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.
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.
So you want to me more productive at work and only use the internet for work (according to the 'why' on that site) and you're going to achieve that goal by taking the time to read all the news articles on Hacker News, write out summaries or reprint the articles and then mail them? Uh.
Firstly, let me clarify. Aside from solving my own dilemma, this is also a business venture, where I look to make money from advertising revenues and such.
Second, once the revenue comes in, I will start delegating jobs to other people, until the point where I don't do most of the work.
And you are right. I will probably have to do all the hard work for the first few issues. But hopefully, ONLY for the first few issues.
I'm not trying to be negative, but take a look at the publishing industry right now. I think you've got to have a really good reason to swim against the stream here, and I don't see it.
-1 more for being 100% unnecessarily wasteful, and I'm really not liking the idea.
Are you saying that you already plan to have hired a staff to do all the "hard stuff" after publishing only a few issues?
That seems delusional. You don't even have a mock up or anything yet to show advertisers. You haven't even worked out how you'll get permission for the content.
Be careful about implying any connection to YC when you are not affiliated with YC. That's a secret rule that can get your post killed. I'm not saying you do here, just that you are coming close by using the phrase "Hacker News". I myself see no problem with what you are doing; you just may want to ask PG if you haven't already.
If you can take the productivity hit to do this, I would be interested. My preferred format is kindle/iPad ebook of some kind, although PDF is fine too. I would pay up to $20/mo, but $5 would be more fair. (I figure I'd save 5-10 hours a month, with only some loss of quality). It's like methadone for a heroin addict.
I'd also appreciate a hackernews-to-rss which actually embedded the body of the article AND the comments, which you could maybe do as a related service. If it were properly paginated to work well on various mobile devices, especially synced to work with no online connectivity during reading, it would be great. iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle would be great targets.
What about? More wasted paper ≈ more planted trees. Wood (and thus paper) is renewable resource or did I miss something? I guess you can worry about transport costs but than perhaps it'd be better to optimise where it matters — like bottled water.
Recycling paper takes a lot of energy and water use, not to mention harsh chemical bleaching. Sorry to burst your "use paper, it's recyclable" mentality. I was disappointed when someone burst mine, too.
Sure, unless they buy the wood from a third world country where corruption is a major issue and influential people can cut forests down and then sell the wood and use a percentage of that to bribe the authorities. Then the real estate people come and houses get built instead of those forests. That's what happens where I live, anyway...
The manufacture of paper does not involve cutting down virgin forests nowadays - trees are specifically planted to be used as paper. No one is "killing a tree" when they print anything - if they didn't print it, we'd plant less trees to make paper with.
There's more involved than just trees here. The environment doesn't just involve plants?
It takes energy to produce trees, cut them down, make paper, transport paper, print magazines, distribute magazines, throw away magazines and then (hopefully) recycle it.
This isn't a solved problem. Far from it. Why not just distribute it digitally.
I think printing yesterday's news on a piece of dead tree, transporting it and then selling it is a stupid idea...
That's another kettle of fish, and you're right on most counts, except I'd lose the "it's stupid" attitude - people 'waste' resources in satisfying their tastes in many ways. We can keep haggling about the price till the cows come home.
Actually, coming back to the trees for paper-making, you can add to the downsides that usually the trees are fast-growing (e.g. eucalyptus), not 'nobler' woods (even humble pines are too slow). And the mills do smell a bit - in a particular highway route, I can tell when I'm driving past one mill I can't see. On the other hand, the process does capture carbon from CO2 ...
P.S. A good argument can be made that 'wasting resources' is the basis of human civilization, without which we'd be living in caves and frugally feeding on berries. Check out what happened because of luxuries like silk and condiments like pepper ...
More likely it's because I dont know the format, so what would be helpful is maybe an example magazine?(yes we like free stuff)
I really dont want to read alot, so summaries are important as well as categories. I personally, dont like news about Apple(iPad), IBM, microsoft etc. But I like to hear what is new for founders, or an interesting blog post. So, it might be good to separate it along some lines.
Well, I'm just telling him what would make an easier buy-in for me. And I'm pretty certain they are others out there like me.
Personally, I like to hear what would change someone's no to a yes, and this is the information I was trying to convey.
I really like this idea. It sounds hard to do well, and it probably won't end up being a net gain in terms of free time for the curators, but I for one would definitely be interested in subscribing.
I like reading on paper much better than in the browser, enough that I would be able to hold off spending too much time reading the internet to avoid spoiling the fun of reading in in the print edition. I already do that with a few other magazines.
I'm a little torn about my HN reading habits- HN has been incredibly educational for the ~1.5 years I've spent here, but it can very easily become a huge time sink. Your proposal just might be the ideal compromise.
Monthly is way too slow for something as fast moving as geek news. (and this site is called "Hacker News", even though some articles certainly are timeless)
I'd make that a weekly, published on Friday morning.
I suspect that the print aspect might be nice locally but disseminating a weekly publication worldwide will offset the niceness of print. The iPad/Kindle wave is coming - ride it, don't avoid it. Time to pivot.
There's an obvious question about comments... perhaps you can take the best comments from each post and ask the author for the right to republish - or even just republish and hopefully/probably nobody will sue you, or even ask pg to change the terms&conditions to grant an irrevocable license to HN to use the comments as you see fit, followed by an authorisation by HN for you to use the comments as you see fit.
Apart from that, there's also the question of how you'll select the articles. Presumably votes aren't enough by themselves, if you want to publish content that's "timeless" you'll have to do some selection. What kind of stuff will end up there? Erlang articles? Start-up wisdom? Scalability tricks? It seems to me that HN pumps out enough content on a weekly basis to produce at least a handful of such themed collections... not sure what the solution is there, but worth thinking about.
counterpoint: monthly is exactly the right pace for geek news. Much of what we read and comment on here is ephemeral crap, and due to the pace of HN there are many repeats of well-known information.
There are only a few good, innovative, really interesting articles on HN per month.
Because of all the downvotes, I suspect people aren't getting what I'm saying: if the author of Hackermonthly wants to run something more frequent as the parent item suggests, he'll need a new name.
While I agree that monthly might be too slow, I think that I, like a lot of others, will still frequent HN quite a bit (read: everyday).
The more I think about it, in fact, the more I like the idea. If he could provide some of the top comments, I would LOVE to read this magazine at the end of the month and read about some of the stuff I will undoubtedly have missed or just overlooked.
I second the above post, go for it and see what happens!
No offense, but your site color (orange background) hurt my eyes. You may want to ask for additional feedback on background color from others too, but for me, I couldn't stand it even for 10 seconds.
This is incredibly appealing to me because I would like to distribute it to people who DON'T read hacker news, so they can get a feel for the hottest new techniques & technologies, as well as a feel for the "pulse" of the elite developer community
I'd rather see a diskmag than a paper mag (like Hugi or something) - since, after all, it's called "Hacker News". Problem would be that most of the content I see on HN is web related, which I have little to no interest.
I cannot say I'm indulged by this news. I want my tech news down to the minute, not a monthly overview. I'm doubtful that many HN users would care to learn more about month old news. IMO this would not be a good representation of the HN community. I believe your target audience is outside the scope of HN (but still technical).
104 comments
[ 6.0 ms ] story [ 214 ms ] threadThat said, I do feel this "Hack Monthly" project should play nice and respect comment "owners".
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.
My own personal attitude when I post something is that I don't own it. Since I lose most controls associated with traditional ownership, it helps me sleep better to not draw a fine legal argument and just assume I don't really own my comments. But of course, I don't post anywhere but HN, so I also make an assumption about pg and the community's attitude of what is the right thing to do.
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;
* Only the top thread;
* The best one-third of comments;
etc.
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.
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.
> 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.
Subscribed out of curiosity, not because of a need since I love reading HN daily.
will I ever buy it as print version, I doubt
Second, once the revenue comes in, I will start delegating jobs to other people, until the point where I don't do most of the work.
And you are right. I will probably have to do all the hard work for the first few issues. But hopefully, ONLY for the first few issues.
-1 more for being 100% unnecessarily wasteful, and I'm really not liking the idea.
That seems delusional. You don't even have a mock up or anything yet to show advertisers. You haven't even worked out how you'll get permission for the content.
(1) make it smaller its ridiculously big, i understand that this style is hip nowadays, buts its also ugly and patronizing
(2) add more white an grey, kinda like the original hacker news site, orange is just one line on the top
I'd also appreciate a hackernews-to-rss which actually embedded the body of the article AND the comments, which you could maybe do as a related service. If it were properly paginated to work well on various mobile devices, especially synced to work with no online connectivity during reading, it would be great. iPhone, Android, iPad, Kindle would be great targets.
I think ignoring copyright is the way to go.
But if it really gone big (a lot of people ordered the printed version), we certainly can devote a percentage of revenue towards planting trees.
It takes energy to produce trees, cut them down, make paper, transport paper, print magazines, distribute magazines, throw away magazines and then (hopefully) recycle it.
This isn't a solved problem. Far from it. Why not just distribute it digitally.
I think printing yesterday's news on a piece of dead tree, transporting it and then selling it is a stupid idea...
Actually, coming back to the trees for paper-making, you can add to the downsides that usually the trees are fast-growing (e.g. eucalyptus), not 'nobler' woods (even humble pines are too slow). And the mills do smell a bit - in a particular highway route, I can tell when I'm driving past one mill I can't see. On the other hand, the process does capture carbon from CO2 ...
P.S. A good argument can be made that 'wasting resources' is the basis of human civilization, without which we'd be living in caves and frugally feeding on berries. Check out what happened because of luxuries like silk and condiments like pepper ...
More likely it's because I dont know the format, so what would be helpful is maybe an example magazine?(yes we like free stuff)
I really dont want to read alot, so summaries are important as well as categories. I personally, dont like news about Apple(iPad), IBM, microsoft etc. But I like to hear what is new for founders, or an interesting blog post. So, it might be good to separate it along some lines.
I think it's a good idea, and i'd subscribe if my country was supported.
I like reading on paper much better than in the browser, enough that I would be able to hold off spending too much time reading the internet to avoid spoiling the fun of reading in in the print edition. I already do that with a few other magazines.
I'm a little torn about my HN reading habits- HN has been incredibly educational for the ~1.5 years I've spent here, but it can very easily become a huge time sink. Your proposal just might be the ideal compromise.
I'd make that a weekly, published on Friday morning.
I suspect that the print aspect might be nice locally but disseminating a weekly publication worldwide will offset the niceness of print. The iPad/Kindle wave is coming - ride it, don't avoid it. Time to pivot.
There's an obvious question about comments... perhaps you can take the best comments from each post and ask the author for the right to republish - or even just republish and hopefully/probably nobody will sue you, or even ask pg to change the terms&conditions to grant an irrevocable license to HN to use the comments as you see fit, followed by an authorisation by HN for you to use the comments as you see fit.
Apart from that, there's also the question of how you'll select the articles. Presumably votes aren't enough by themselves, if you want to publish content that's "timeless" you'll have to do some selection. What kind of stuff will end up there? Erlang articles? Start-up wisdom? Scalability tricks? It seems to me that HN pumps out enough content on a weekly basis to produce at least a handful of such themed collections... not sure what the solution is there, but worth thinking about.
There are only a few good, innovative, really interesting articles on HN per month.
The more I think about it, in fact, the more I like the idea. If he could provide some of the top comments, I would LOVE to read this magazine at the end of the month and read about some of the stuff I will undoubtedly have missed or just overlooked.
I second the above post, go for it and see what happens!
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