Questions tagged [licensing]
Questions about the licensing of content on Stack Exchange sites.
267
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When did Stack Exchange start to dual-license user content?
Stack Exchange currently dual-licenses user content, which allows them to sell user content without attributing users. When did the dual-licensing start?
The Wayback Machine's first save of the ToS ...
GlorfindelMod
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543
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58
answers
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The MIT License – Clarity on Using Code on Stack Overflow and Stack Exchange
Update (Dec. 22, 2015): Thanks, everyone, for your feedback to this proposal. We're going to digest this one over the holidays and should have a follow-up announcement answering your questions and ...
23
votes
1
answer
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The create-chatroom page incorrectly specifies the conversations as licensed under "cc-wiki" (CC BY-SA 2.5)
The create a new chat-room page likely doesn't get a lot of traffic, which probably makes issues with it have a relatively low impact, but this one should be fixed:
The text reads:
All ...
CommunityBot
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17
votes
1
answer
404
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Can I make a YouTube video adapting Stack Overflow content?
There are many interesting questions on Stack Overflow, that have many good answers and many good comments. I want to make an animated YouTube video about a question and some answers to help visual ...
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20
votes
2
answers
361
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Are Stack Exchange blog articles also under Creative Common license?
Recently I stumbled on the site of an IT company that replicated the entire article "Do large language models know what they are talking about?" with attribution.
For basic content on the ...
- 7,418
14
votes
2
answers
956
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Is SE in violation of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license by not providing data dumps?
SE is no longer providing data dumps for the content contributed by their users.
CC BY-SA 4.0 states:
No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally ...
- 13.4k
27
votes
2
answers
495
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What license do the help center articles that are editable by moderators fall under?
I was looking at the text of the CC BY-SA 4.0 license, which is the license used by posts on the SE network. Specifically, I noted the phrase that...
You must give appropriate credit, provide a link ...
- 7,025
0
votes
3
answers
187
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Does linked content count as "Subscriber Content" under the TOS?
The SE TOS defines "Subscriber Content" as:
any and all content, including without limitation any and all text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, software or ...
- 25.9k
4
votes
1
answer
142
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Posting content under licenses besides CC BY-SA 4.0
If I post content (authored by me) on an SE site, and I have released it under some license X, how does this work with the SE TOS (even though it links to SO I assume it's applicable to all sites ...
- 13.3k
43
votes
2
answers
720
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How can SE gate access to the Dump that will allow individuals access to the data while preventing "misuse" by for-profit organizations?
I read this answer written by Jody Bailey:
We are looking for ways to gate access to the Dump, APIs, and SEDE, that will allow individuals access to the data while preventing misuse by organizations ...
- 13.4k
40
votes
0
answers
217
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Stopping data dumps to "protect data" - harmful and threatening to the community
I find it a bit odd that "senior leadership is working on a strategy to protect Stack Overflow data from being misused by companies building LLMs", but historically has only cared about ...
- 43.9k
20
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0
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197
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Will SE tell us if they sell our content?
So, the CEO of Stack Exchange has been quoted in a news article saying that they plan to sell the content of the SE network to large companies training neural networks like the one used for ChatGPT. ...
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111
votes
7
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Is SE [going to be] selling our content for AI model training? And what exactly does "reinvest back into our communities" mean?
Wired published an article titled Stack Overflow Will Charge AI Giants for Training Data. I read through it, and a few sections seemed noteworthy to me
"Community platforms that fuel LLMs ...
7
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1
answer
277
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Is SE legally allowed to sell user content for AI model training despite the fact that some of this content is not allowed to be used to train AIs?
SE Inc. wants to sell our content to some companies for AI training. However, some of our content is not allowed to be used to train AIs. E.g., since ChatGPT hasn't been banned on all SE sites, some ...
- 58.2k
29
votes
2
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532
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Can SE just resell our data, relicense it and remove the attribution requirement?
SE has decided to charge for the network content when used for training AI according to an article. This has not been officially announced here, so we do not know the details.
But the main question to ...
- 21.6k
0
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1
answer
227
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If a company makes a commercial use of an AI model trained on SE data and attribute all authors, will SE Inc. not charge them?
I read Is SE [going to be] selling our content for AI model training? And what exactly does "reinvest back into our communities" mean?. SE Inc. indicates that the will charge some firms if ...
- 170k
-12
votes
2
answers
259
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Don't I have the right to edit or delete my own content?
If someone answers my question, I can't delete it anymore even if
I have 10 downvotes.
After condition so and so, I'm unable to edit the comment.
I can't delete more than 5 answers a day.
I can't ...
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38
votes
6
answers
1k
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Dealing with posts plagiarising from copyrighted sources
What means do users have to report plagiarism or posting of copyrighted work?
A button to flag content as plagiarism would be useful. It's not quite "offensive," and should probably have a different ...
- 40.4k
15
votes
1
answer
1k
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As a workaround to Imgur being blocked, is there a image hosting site which allows URL uploads and does not violate CC BY-SA 4.0 copyright?
Imgur is blocked in China (and probably in some other countries as well as many workplaces and educational institutions). This is annoying for Chinese users and Chinese.SE in particular.
Workaround: ...
GlorfindelMod
- 248k
1
vote
0
answers
68
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YouTube channel scraping Q&A from Stack Exchange [duplicate]
There is this horrible YouTube channel scraping Q&A from Stack Exchange without attribution to the author of either question or answers, and no links to the original post.
Stack Exchange licenses ...
- 6,675
8
votes
1
answer
109
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License link on SEDE archive page points to wrong BY-SA version
On the Stack Exchange Data Explorer Help page, there is a link to the Internet Archive page. On the Stack Exchange Archive page, there is a section for licensing, with the following description:
All ...
Aaron BertrandStaff
- 37.1k
2
votes
0
answers
53
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Does Stack Exchange take any measures against sites violating our license? [duplicate]
I updated an answer of mine with an improved solution:
Does PostgreSQL support "accent insensitive" collations?
I hit Google to find related answers that might be outdated now, just to ...
- 3,039
9
votes
0
answers
108
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Post disassociation requests should also apply to the author's messages in chat rooms generated from comments on the post
A while ago I made a question, and later decided to be disassociated from that question. However doing so does not completely disassociate your account from this question.
If a comment thread gets ...
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-25
votes
4
answers
360
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Does the license given to Stack Exchange forbid the "additional terms", terminate the license, making it useless? [closed]
The term of service of Stack Overflow add "additional terms" to creative commons license. In question Are the SE additions to the Creative Commons attribution requirements enforceable? the ...
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-452
votes
24
answers
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Stack Exchange and Stack Overflow have moved to CC BY-SA 4.0
Effective today, all Subscriber Content on Stack Overflow and the Stack Exchange network will be available under the terms of version 4.0 of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA) ...
- 76.2k
10
votes
0
answers
68
views
Show license info for tag excerpts and wikis explicitly
All user contributions on Stack Exchange are licensed (currently under CC-BY-SA 4.0). Back in 2020, Creative Commons Licensing UI and Data Updates made a change in showing the license explicitly for Q&...
- 12.2k
21
votes
0
answers
412
views
To who are translations licensed in Stack Exchange international sites that are submitted by community users?
International sites translate much of their content (other than questions and answers) with the help of community users.
How are these contributions licensed?
There are more than 10,000 strings, not a ...
5
votes
0
answers
69
views
Make license terms more prominent
A lot of people are unaware of license terms that apply to code pieces posted on Stack Overflow or the internet in general. This is from my own experience but is also stated in a paper here. And some ...
- 15.2k
17
votes
0
answers
123
views
When adding image from Wikimedia Commons, automatically add author/license/link
Many Stack Exchange questions and answers embed images from Wikimedia Commons. It is probably the most used image source here.
The good news
Thanks to their license, all images from Wikimedia Commons ...
- 6,675
2
votes
0
answers
85
views
How to give attribution when using the same code on multiple webpages [closed]
I am very new to the Stack Overflow community. I noticed that there are several excellent answers here that can help me to build a website. I am a little bit aware of the License CC BY-SA 4.0 applied ...
- 6,675
3
votes
0
answers
208
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Do I have to worry about patent issues for code posted on Stack Overflow?
I purposely named this question similar to Do I have to worry about copyright issues for code posted on Stack Overflow?. Since Fedora is banning CC-0 licensed source code citing issue of explicitly ...
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-2
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1
answer
126
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License and our ezine [duplicate]
We have a GFDL ezine about the FOSS world. After consultation, we decided to add a section about an article that describes Q/A from unix.stackexchange or stackoverflow.com and so on for each number. ...
9
votes
1
answer
141
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Who has ownership of a Question/Answer after the account that posted it is deleted? [duplicate]
There has been some questions surrounding post ownership after a user voluntarily deleted their account and now they have a new account on the site. In a recent meta they referenced it as their post ...
- 34.9k
12
votes
1
answer
420
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Form to request erasure under GDPR doesn't indicate that attribution will be removed from all posts, a possible license violation
It's long been the case that when a user requests their account be deleted, all of their contributions are dissociated from their name. This would ordinarily be considered a violation of the CC BY-SA ...
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230
votes
10
answers
23k
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Is it legal to copy Stack Overflow questions and answers?
I just found http://programmingfaq.w3ec.com/faq/4761/whats-the-hi-lo-algorithm which has an exact copy of this Stack Overflow question, What's the Hi/Lo Algorithm, with all its answers and no ...
- 17.8k
10
votes
1
answer
901
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Should Stack Exchange switch to CC BY-SA 3.0? [duplicate]
Currently, Stack Exchange sites use the CC BY-SA 2.5 license.
There's a lot of content (not the least of which is Wikipedia) under the newer 3.0 version of this license.
Content licensed under 2.5 ...
7
votes
0
answers
54
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Why does the license link take me to Stack Overflow's license page? [duplicate]
The license information in the lower right corner of every page links to https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing instead of to the site's (existing) corresponding page (for example, on the Cross ...
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votes
1
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146
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Why does my comment show 41 "license: CC by SA 4.0"? Are all comments protected under copyright?
Why does my comment show this?
41 license: CC by SA 4.0
Are all comments protected under "creative commons" copyright? What does 41 mean? Why not 1 license - why 41?
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229
votes
23
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Creative Commons Licensing UI and Data Updates
When we last updated you to clarify concerns and answer questions about our transition to version 4.0 of the CC BY-SA license we committed to posting updates to the UI and addressing unanswered ...
6
votes
1
answer
362
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How can I correctly specify the license for my code snippets? [duplicate]
Per default, code snippets posted on Stack Overflow are licensed under CC BY-SA-*; see https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing. This includes a share-alike obligation and attribution obligation, both ...
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41
votes
2
answers
3k
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Where can I ask about Software Licenses/Licensing?
Is it appropriate to ask questions about software licenses/licensing on StackOverflow? Or is the appropriate place Programmers Stack Exchange? Or is there no appropriate site currently and we should ...
4
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2
answers
135
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Is it against the rules to link from my own, monetized site to a question or answer on SE?
I want to document my progress on various projects and, as part of that documentation, I want to publish the questions I ask on the various SE sites. The website will be monetized. The questions I ask ...
- 23.2k
3
votes
1
answer
67
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Regarding ownership of computer program source-code shared in an answer on a Stack Exchange site
I have active accounts on various Stack Exchange sites falling under Technology domain. Due to the nature of the domain, often the posted answers in part or whole, requires me to to write some form of ...
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-25
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249
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Tags assigned to a question should be CC BY-SA licensed
Glorfindel♦ wrote:
The CC BY-SA license only covers content. Tags are (apparently) considered metadata.
Feature request: Tags assigned to a question should be CC BY-SA licensed.
Answers to comments:...
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9
votes
1
answer
133
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Why aren't tag edits and comments licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0 in post timelines?
E.g.:
Why aren't tag edits and comments licensed as CC BY-SA 4.0 in post timelines?
GlorfindelMod
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51
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2
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Can one take the entire Q&A base and move it to a new site?
In the light of all recent moderators and experienced users quitting, I was wondering if anyone is allowed to take the entire Q&A set of a site, and move it to a new site, with new rules?
I think ...
5
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1
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171
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Can I reuse and republish code snippets from Stack Exchange sites under a new license?
I want to start a project, Scheme Cookbook, with a better license because an old cookbook, that is no longer available online, was licensed under LGPL, which requires the inclusion of the license with ...
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3
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98
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Somebody posted an answer that is modified but based on my earlier answer. How should I react?
This question is related to this: What is the connection between an answer and its poster, none?
What do Stack Exchange rules say about use and re-use of answers? Are users restricted from answering ...
- 25.1k
4
votes
1
answer
137
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Can “Community Wiki” become public domain? [duplicate]
What is the license of an answer marked community wiki?
It seems a normal answer is CC-BY-SA, which can possibly not be kept for community wiki contributions, since the author becomes the community.
...
CommunityBot
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Do users have right to not allow redistribution of their posts?
In my understanding, the CC BY-SA 4.0 license allows me to redistribute any material posted in Stack Exchange, as long as I put a link back to the original post. Does that mean a user has a right to ...
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