Bug or license issue with imported post from SE?
This post is a blatant copy of this SE post. It lacks the little "hamburger icon" that's supposed to pop up when a post is imported by staff. So either there's some glitch here with missing hamburger, or the poster imported the post manually.
In case of manual import, could this be a licensing issue or is it ok to copy/paste posts like this? Since no attribution is given to the SE post and we don't even know if it's the same user.
Just asking here to make sure that we don't get in trouble with SE and get accused of scraping their sites. The image link even goes to stack.imgur.com.
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As far as I can tell, the post was transfered manually, i.e. by copy and paste.
While this is generally okay, you have to either
- add the neccessary attribution per CC BY-SA or
- state that you are the author of the original post (only if you are of course).
I added a comment there asking the author to do one of those things.
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Thank you for raising this question.
This post didn't use Codidact's import script; it was manually copied here. If the person is the same user as on the other site, that's kosher -- you always own your own work and can repost it anywhere else without any licensing considerations. While not definitive, a quick peek at the user profile on the SE question tells me that this user isn't participating on SE now and thus might have more reason to come here.
If the user who posted it here is not the same person as the author of the post there, then this would be a copyright violation, not a license violation. We're not equipped to do copyright investigations; if someone claiming to be the SE user comes to us and says "I'm not the one who reposted on your site and I object", then we'll investigate.[1] The simplest assumption is that it's the same person, and we can operate on that assumption until we have reason to doubt it.
The special icon and attribution for imports are for when we import somebody else's content. We're allowed to do that so long as we follow the attribution requirements of the license. The icon isn't required but is something we added to help people distinguish these questions if they want to.
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SE takes the same approach to possible copyright violations: it's up to the wronged user to complain; they don't investigate everything that could be a violation. It wouldn't be reasonable of them to demand more from us than they do themselves with a much bigger staff and hundreds of millions of dollars of venture capital. ↩︎
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