Disclaimer: I am not looking for a legal advice here, I want to clarify the terms of the SO license.

Recently I was helping a user with his question. This was a question of the "seeking debugging help" kind. (The user had problems compiling his XML Schema in a Maven project.)

The user shared his code not directly in question but as a link to some "share" site of a pastebin-kind. He also shared a link to the .zip file with his Maven project. The question was specifically asking for help with this Maven project. Contents are some stripped-down samples of larger, but publicly available schema.

I wanted to help the user, so I have downloaded the .zip file and quickly fixed the project. I have then shared the results via my GitHub repo. I.e. I have created a test project there, wrote a new pom.xml (project file in Maven) and added the schema and sample files from the user's .zip. The user basically got an anwer "this is what the problem was and here's a working project for you".

The question was later on closed as being to broad. Closing was initiated by me after I learned few things in another thread here on meta.

The user then found out that his question was closed and took it personally. He also complained that he did not authorize me to share his code on GitHub.

I have removed the code and apologized.

An this is where I'm getting to my question.

Could please someone help me to clarify the license applicability terms to the linked code on external websites in questions seeking debugging help?

From one side, if you ignore all the details of me trying to help out, this looks like a copyright infringement. I have taken something from web and put it in my GitHub repo. Not good.

From the other side, this was a content shared as link on SO specifically asking for help. Claiming a copyright infringement on this code against the person tried to help and helped is not just nonsense, it damages the good faith SO operates on.

Consider the following situation: user A asks for help and shares his code snippet on pastebin, user B finds the mistake and posts the corrected code directly in the answer. If we assume that user's A copyright claim against user B is sound, user B is in danger.

In this case all links to external sites in questions seeking debugging help put those who want to help in danger. Unless an explicit permission is given and linked code has a proper license attribution (this is, of course, never the case), it makes anyone who answers and shares code in the answer potentially vulnerable to copyright claims.

Could you please help me to clarify this?

Relevant posts:

I've read these above but could not find exactly my case there. This case is about linked code but specifically linked to be helped with. It is different from sharing the code within the post or just linking to "some" code (i.e. some SVN or GitHub repo).

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    Well, this is one of the reasons we demand that questions include the relevant code snippets and documentation in the question itself rather than on some 3rd party site. If you helped this user solve his problem and get complaints in return then that's certainly where your moral obligation to stay involved with this Q+A ends. Next time just don't answer such questions, they don't end well as a rule. – Hans Passant Oct 17 '14 at 8:14

Anything you post on pastebin, sqlfiddle, or github is covered by their terms of service, not SO's. The text you post on SO is covered by SO's terms of service, but I don't get CC licensing to microsoft.com just by linking to it, do I? Same applies to code posted elsewhere.

Now, ethically do I think you did anything wrong? No. But the code on Github was covered by their ToS, not SO's.

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  • Correct, I'm not asking about the ethical part. I want to determine if I should avoid such questions. – lexicore Oct 17 '14 at 8:31
  • Whether you should avoid such questions is entirely up to you. – Joe Oct 17 '14 at 8:32
  • Also correct. My question was if I am somehow protected by the license terms. Apparenty, I am not. – lexicore Oct 17 '14 at 8:34
  • Assuming the SO license terms protect you is an unreliable assumption anyway, because you assume the user actually has the permission to sublicence the code he's posting. Sharing snippets may not impose a problem for him and the code owner, but when you're using it this may get you in trouble, even when SO writes "cc licensed" in its ToS. The ToS are there to protect SO (they can claim the user should not have posted it and they are not responsible for the incident), but cannot protect you. And SO will have to remove it as well, as soon as they get informed of the copyright violation. – allo Sep 6 '18 at 14:21

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