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I believe reddit comments are made under a CC license



Closest thing to an answer I've found is from the licensing page: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/licensing

But it doesn't specifically address collection and distribution of API results as a dataset.

(From the page:)

A licensing agreement is required in order to:

* use the reddit API for commercial purposes. Use of the API is considered "commercial" if you are earning money from it, including via in-app advertising or in-app purchases. Open source use is generally considered non-commercial.

* use the reddit alien logo ("snoo") in your app or for its thumbnail. Any new apps you create must be approved as well before usage. The circular "r" logo is reserved solely for use by reddit, Inc.

* allow users to subscribe to reddit gold via in-app purchases. If your platform allows for it, we encourage you to work with us to make this happen. We see gold purchases as a way for you to help reddit and to give back to the reddit community.


> use the reddit alien logo ("snoo") in your app or for its thumbnail

Do any of the apps actually do this, though? (Especially the free ones.)


UReddit does, but may not be a great example because I received permission to use the logo in a private conversantion with hueypriest years ago (as long as I didn't try to monetize the project).


According to Reddit's User Agreement user content:

"You retain the rights to your copyrighted content or information that you submit to reddit ('user content') except as described below."

And the exceptions just state that Reddit has a perpetual irrevocable worldwide license.

So it seems like there's no default license and others don't have any automatic rights to use the content. Does this assessment seem correct? In practice, it may not be a big problem, particularly for academic research and such, but I'm guessing there are some uses that might cause problems.


Good find, I think I got reddit confused with stackoverflow or wikipedia. If there's no clear assignment of copyright to api users, I would imagine that would be problematic for 3rd party app makers.


Isn't this true only if the 3rd party apps are saving the data and/or redistributing it? Apps should be able to request data from reddit just as a normal user would through their browser, since reddit has permission to use (and serve) that content.


Nit: I don't think copyright assignment is the correct term here. That refers to transferring the ownership of the root rights to the material, but you're just referring to granting specific rights under a license.


Not sure if the comments are under any license.




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