> You ever make a model train set?

Yes I have, but for some reason I did not go to Union Pacific railyards and pry metal sidings off of the rolling stock. Nor did I siphon diesel fuel out of the locomotives! FFS!

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sillysaurusx 5 hours ago | parent [-]

When you do that, the locomotives lose diesel and I gain diesel. When I copy a comment nothing is lost (except an insignificant amount of HN's performance, which I'm working with Dan to make sure to stay in bounds of).

It's open source. The point of open source is that you have a lit candle and I have an unlit one. Lighting mine with yours doesn't extinguish your flame; there are now two flames.

The site will eventually offer an extended API that shows content that the official API doesn't, like downvotes and [flagged] status. It's partly why I made it, since there was no way to see flagged comments without visiting HN directly.

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ButlerianJihad 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Comments are not open source! Our contributions are copyrighted and we didn’t give y’all no license for it! We license to YC, not to randos!

I spit on your fucking illicit candle, bro! I slap that candle out of your hand! “You Didn’t Build That!”

You pirated it all!

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sillysaurusx 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Actually, scraping a publicly accessible website has been litigated extensively. In hiQ Labs vs Linkedin, the court held that scraping publicly accessible data doesn't violate the CFAA.

Regarding copyright, copying for display purposes non-commercially seems to be fair use. There are four factors to fair use analysis: purpose (non-commercial art project), nature of the work (short factual public comments), amount taken (individual comments in context), and market harm (none, your comment still exists on HN and YC loses nothing). Three of the four factors favor fair use, and arguably all four.

The point is, it's not as cut and dry as you're portraying it to be. If you post data publicly on the internet, you should expect it to be read. The current legal system seems to support this theory.

Since this neither violates the CFAA nor copyright, it seems ok. Publicly posted content carries an implied license for reasonable access and display. That's why you can quote HN comments in a blog post without getting sued.

	▲	ButlerianJihad 4 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Considering the topic of the very thread you are posting in right now, your comment is steeped in irony and ignorance. Good luck, have fun, don’t get sued.