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

Wander@yiffit.net to No Stupid Questions@lemmy.world – 138 points –

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.

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Yes, but lemmit simply posts new stuff in chronological order. I'm talking about re-posting the countless good guides and tutorials so that searching on Lemmy can give better results.

Not a lawyer but I know a little bit!

So the Reddit user agreement (Effective June 19, 2023. Last Revised April 18, 2023) says:

  1. Your Content The Services may contain information, text, links, graphics, photos, videos, audio, streams, or other materials (“Content”), including Content created with or submitted to the Services by you or through your Account (“Your Content”). We take no responsibility for and we do not expressly or implicitly endorse, support, or guarantee the completeness, truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of Your Content.

By submitting Your Content to the Services, you represent and warrant that you have all rights, power, and authority necessary to grant the rights to Your Content contained within these Terms. Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.

You retain any ownership rights you have in Your Content, but you grant Reddit the following license to use that Content:

When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, and sublicensable license to use, copy, modify, adapt, prepare derivative works of, distribute, store, perform, and display Your Content and any name, username, voice, or likeness provided in connection with Your Content in all media formats and channels now known or later developed anywhere in the world. This license includes the right for us to make Your Content available for syndication, broadcast, distribution, or publication by other companies, organizations, or individuals who partner with Reddit. You also agree that we may remove metadata associated with Your Content, and you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content.

What this means (I think) is that while reddit is forever allowed to use whatever you posted in any way, even selling and monetising it, the author retains copyright of their post/comments. So if you copy/paste something over from reddit, the author can claim copyright infringement, but not reddit.

Please don't treat this as legal advice!

Thank you so much!

Also not a lawyer, but I cannot recall a single instance of an online text post being the catalyst of a copyright lawsuit. AFAIK, there are deliberate steps one must take in order to protect their intellectual property. Please correct me if I’m wrong.

How could Reddit sell your content if you have copyright over it? You could immediately sue Reddit in that case.