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.

45 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

!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.
  
  Glad I could help 🙂

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
- 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
  
  Which title? Greedy Pig Boy? Or Official Moderator of r/jailbait?
- Lawyer or not, it doesn’t matter. Your laws aren’t my laws. It’s the internet. You can copy anything you want.

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.
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.

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.

Who cares? Just post it. The knowledge is what's important, not some rando author's karma count.

According to the Reddit terms of service, the person that posts the content owns the copyright. So Reddit itself can’t make you take it down. The person that wrote it could since they hold the copyright.
The legal thing to do would be to ask permission from whoever wrote it.
- I wonder if this means I can sue Reddit for copyright violations on all the comments in my now deleted account that were rolled back?
  I clicked the delete button, and the site confirmed they were in fact deleted. They shouldn't be allowed to rollback content that I own the copyright to.
  
  You gave them a license to do so:
  "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. "

No potential issues, unless the text itself is illegal in some way.

I mean it's the same as finding information for homework. Find it and rewrite it in your own words.
- Hopefully also bringing together more than one source.

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 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.

The legality isn't a question that can really be answered, because there's no precedent for copying things from one forum to another, and it's very unlikely that you're going to get sued because there's no money involved here. The OP from the reddit post isn't making money from that post, and you're not making money from copying it.
Ethically, I think it's fine if you're diligent about citing your sources.
- Also what’s legal for one isn’t legal for another. And what’s illegal for one is totally fine for another. See: American cannabis laws. I don’t even use it, but it’s hilarious that it’s illegal there.
- I have seen many stack overflow clones that copy the question and all the answers and pretend to be fresh content.

If it's on Reddit and visible via Google search, it's public information. Posts online generally do not have any sort of ownership or protections legally.
I could copy your post and repost it somewhere else, I could even claim it as my own post and idea, with zero legal ramifications. Though taking credit for it would make me a dick. I'd just credit the original user. Even if it's just "crosspost from Reddit user /u/insertUsername"
- Absolute rubbish. They're copyrighted like anything else you write.
  From the reddit GTCs:
  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.

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

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

If the content is available without having to login, you can legally use it. This was ruled in the courts against Microsoft when they sued somebody for scraping LinkedIn. Scraping and manually copying stuff is not so different.

45 comments