I don't like the idea of someone (Stack Overflow itself can do what it wants) illegally profiting from content that I've written on Stack Overflow for the community.

Isn't that what this person is doing?

  • 7
    So long as they cite all of the content properly, which it sounds like they are from the description, it's just fine. One would need to see if each of the questions in the book actually names the author of that post, and links to the question on the site, as is required, but the description doesn't make it sound as if it's assertion SO content as their original content. I don't see any sort of free preview option, so someone who actually owns a copy of the book would likely need to verify if this is done properly.
    – Servy
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:24
  • 79
    I don't like the idea of someone profiting from content that I've written on stackoverflow for the community. You specifically licenced that right away when you posted the content on SO. Anyone in the world has the right to profit from your contributions, so long as they cite the content appropriately.
    – Servy
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:28
  • This was actually discussed a long time ago, and it seemed to garnish enough community support that it moved forward.
    – Travis J
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:35
    – zzzeek
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:36
  • 15
    @zzzeek Now keep reading and you'll get to the section on subscriber content. You're a subscriber, not the network. The network content is all of the content that is original works of SE INC, rather that contributions submitted by users of the site. "You agree that all Subscriber Content that You contribute to the Network is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike license."
    – Servy
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:46
  • 3
    @travis-j whether or not this is within the terms i find that amazing that the community would support some guy basically scraping the SO site into PDFS and selling them on amazon, listing himself as the "author".
    – zzzeek
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:51
  • 2
    @zzzeek - Well I would assume he authors the collection, but individual questions and answers have SO users name directly in print.
    – Travis J
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:53
  • 2
    So who's buying one so we know? Oct 3 '14 at 18:55
  • 30
    @zzzeek The whole point of the CC-Wiki licence of SO content is to specifically allow people to do stuff like this, so long as they follow a set of reasonable restrictions when it comes to attribution. The fact that just anyone is freely able to re-distribute all content posted to SE was one of their primary selling points of the site. And note that this person is very explicit about the fact that he didn't author every question/answer, but rather composed the collection of the works of others. The content that is original appears to be clear, making that entirely acceptable.
    – Servy
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:56
  • 4
    @servy but the content has to be redistributed under the same license. can a CC-by-SA work be DRMed ? that's sort of the question I have now.
    – zzzeek
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:58
  • 3
    At one time (maybe 10 years ago) I could use Google to find about 8 places on the web where some advice I'd given for home maintenance had been copied verbatum, with only a couple of them attributing to me. If you don't want it copied, don't put it on the web.
    – Hot Licks
    Oct 4 '14 at 12:28
  • 4
    Actually taking the most upvoted questions in each tag and compiling them into a list with one or two most upvoted answers next to them is not such a bad idea at all. Apart from the legal issues of this guy I would like to have such a feature directly from SO. It might be this guy might have found an excellent way to extract the most valuable knowledge from SO.
    – Trilarion
    Oct 4 '14 at 19:22
  • 4
    @Trilarion I was thinking the same. Wikipedia does something similar. You select a few pages, and it generated a pdf: en.wikipedia.org/w/…. We could do that on SO, and select several questions, and the answer we want for each, and it generates a Q&A sheet. Good for handouts for classes?
    – matsjoyce
    Oct 4 '14 at 20:20
  • 14
    Who the hell would buy something like that?
    – canon
    Oct 5 '14 at 2:45
  • 2
    On their "Report Abuse" page: We attach great importance to your advises, and what we build this site is for you. Some guys, neither you nor me post illegal infomation here, we appreciate you report it. Please tell us your Contact Infomation if you want our feedback. Besides the atrocious spelling and grammar, looks like their willing to take down infringing content... Oct 6 '14 at 15:02

Even if the books properly credit every author, a for-sale Kindle book doesn't suit the spirit of a "Share Alike" licence.

You're allowed to charge for a physical copy or convenience file of something and still have it count as "Share Alike", but only so long as other people are free to make their own copies of your work.


  • 28
    The part that may be of concern is No additional restrictions — You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the license permits. which means if there's a DRM on the books, it violate the license. Oct 3 '14 at 18:54
  • 21
    Exactly. I'm not an expert in Amazon's Kindle format, but I'm pretty sure that DRM is the default. There's nothing on the Amazon page to indicate a different setting for these files, so it definitely looks like a violation of "Share Alike", even if it meets the requirements for "Attribution".
    – AmeliaBR
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:58
  • @AmeliaBR You can specifically opt out of having DRM on Kindle books you publish through Amazon - it even puts a note on that books Amazon page to inform the user that there is no DRM on the title.
    – Moo
    Oct 6 '14 at 15:36
  • 1
    @Moo: Does that mean I have open, unfettered access to such files on my Kindle? How would that work, exactly? Last time I checked, the Kindle was a closed system. Would I have to somehow decode such files to get to the text for share-alike purposes? You can call it whatever your like, but it's still a technological hurdle. Oct 6 '14 at 15:40
  • 2
    @RobertHarvey For whatever it's worth, the threshold of what constitutes a disallowed DRM by Creative Commons: "A technological measure is considered an ETM if circumventing it carries penalties under laws fulfilling obligations under Article 11 of the WIPO Copyright Treaty". That said, I have no idea if that applies to whatever Amazon does to their files, whether they are "DRM-free" or not. CC has explicitly said using an obscure format or platform is not prohibited (though not encouraged, of course).
    – apsillers
    Oct 6 '14 at 17:01
  • @Moo Thanks for the info. There was definitely no such DRM-free notice on the Amazon pages when I checked them the other day; however, it looks like Amazon has taken notice of concerns -- all the links to Amazon's site are currently returning 404 errors.
    – AmeliaBR
    Oct 6 '14 at 17:42
  • 1
    @AmeliaBR: At least the C "book" still shows up for sale on Amazon: amazon.com/dp/B00MRAO5PC. (And it includes at least two of my answers -- grr.) Oct 7 '14 at 2:25
  • @RobertHarvey You can download your books from the Amazon website via "manage your content and devices", and non-DRM books are standard MOBI format which is well documented. I wouldn't consider it being in MOBI format to be a "technological hurdle", as they have to pick a format.
    – Moo
    Oct 7 '14 at 8:10
  • @Moo: Blargh .... Oct 7 '14 at 14:42

The CC-BY-SA license requires that


There is no link to or even mention of the license in the books. IMO, it's infringing not only SO's terms of use, but the copyright of all of the contributors whose work is included.

(disclaimer: I am not a lawyer)

  • 1
    Just to be clear: you purchased a copy of one of the books and saw that it didn't have any reference to the CC-BY-SA license? I'm not surprised to hear it, but I just want to be clear that that's what you did.
    – apsillers
    Oct 6 '14 at 16:20
  • No, Amazon will let you browse the content (well, not the entire book, but enough of it) for free. I suppose they might have hidden the link the license at the very end; it's certainly not anywhere prominent in the beginning.
    – Wooble
    Oct 6 '14 at 17:27
  • 1
    And it's also obviously morally bankrupt. It really incenses me that people think this is an appropriate thing to do. Bloody bastards. Nov 20 '14 at 10:27

I am not a lawyer, and I hope it's perfectly clear that this isn't legal advice -- I'm just summarizing licensing information already made available by Creative Commons and Stack Exchange.

Short answer: Generally, redistributing Stack Exchange content is fine (even for profit), subject to a few rules. This case, however, violates one of those rules.

You already gave permission

Generally, redistributing user-submitted Stack Exchange content is perfectly legal. All user-submitted posts on the Stack Exchange network have been licensed to Stack Exchange under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), and Stack Exchange shares your licensed posts under that license. Per the Legal page:


There's a handy reminder of this at the bottom of every page:

user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

Thus, redistribution is perfectly legal as long as the person redistributing the Stack Exchange posts complies with the license terms and Stack Exchange's more strict attribution terms.

I can't verify that the books adhere to the attribution terms or include a copy of the CC-BY-SA license text, because I didn't buy a copy, but let's generously assume that they do. (If they don't, then they are in the legal wrong here.) As long as the person who put the books together follows the rules of CC-BY-SA, everything smells okay to me. If the books were sold as PDFs from the person's website, they'd be in the clear. However, they're using Amazon's Kindle store, which is where we run into trouble.

DRM is not allowed

The Creative Commons organization has made it very clear that the no Creative Commons license allows the work to be distributed with DRM. Specifically, they make it clear that the CC licenses forbid any "effective technological measures" (ETMs) that impede the recipient's ability to exercise their rights under a CC license:




Here, the music site example appears to be a direct parallel. If you have written a CC-license post ("remix a CC-licensed song") and put it on the Kindle store, subjecting it to Amazon's DRM ("share it on a music site that places digital copy-restriction on all uploaded files"), the Creative Commons organization is of the opinion that such a form of distribution violates any CC license.

The above assessment assumes that Amazon's DRM (which I know very little about) satisfies the Creative Commons organization's definition of an ETM. Furthermore, I think Kindle eBooks can be sold without DRM at the seller's option (I'm pretty sure this one currently isn't, though). If the seller turns off DRM, and that allows recipients to enjoy the rights of the CC license without running afoul of DRM laws, then there's no problem.

So what can I do about it?

This is pretty tricky. First, I think you'll need to assess that a question or answer of yours is in the book, having DRM applied to it without your permission. (This would require you to buy a copy. You can increase your certainty your content is included by checking if you have a top-rated question or answer in one of the tags compiled by the author.) This is important, because otherwise, none of your rights are being impinged and you don't really have any legal ground to complain.

If you feel confident that Amazon's DRM applies to this eBook, and that Amazon's DRM is indeed an ETM in violation of CC-BY-SA, then this is a violation of how you've licensed your content. Certainly the easiest thing to do would be to file a DMCA takedown request with Amazon. It might be helpful to identify which particular post in question is yours, and specifically note in your complaint that, while your content is indeed licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike, the author violates section 4(a) (or possibly 4(b)) of that license because DRM has been applied to the eBook.

  • 6
    Or ask @JonSkeet to raise a complaint, he's gotta be in there!
    – Ian
    Oct 6 '14 at 15:37
  • I think that your observation about the distinction between selling a pdf and selling a bundled kindle item may be accurate.
    – Travis J
    Oct 6 '14 at 17:38

Per your quote, the expansion of "reproduce(except as provided in this Section)" looks something like



Which mostly to say that as long as the published material is fully credited, including names, dates, links, etc., there is no violation.

  • if this content is DRMed, as I would assume is the case, how about that ?
    – zzzeek
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:46
  • 10
    "share alike: If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same license as the original. ". this work isn't CC-by-SA AFAICT
    – zzzeek
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:47
  • If you have to pay for it, probably not. Oct 3 '14 at 18:48
  • 5
    @JonathanDrapeau Not so. The licence doesn't prohibit the content from being sold; all it does is ensure that people are allowed to give it away for free if they want.
    – Servy
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:50
  • 5
    It is essentially a book of quotes. The author does not own the quotes but with proper attribution is free to use them. If they compose the whole set of quotes and sell it, there is nothing wrong with that as long as the quotes are attributed. This happens all the time in literature.
    – Travis J
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:51
  • 1
    @zzzeek So long as the licence is mentioned somewhere within the book that qualification would be met. It's not like the description of the book on the site would need to include that.
    – Servy
    Oct 3 '14 at 18:51
  • 6
    @TravisJ If the book got any DRM, it violates the license. Oct 3 '14 at 19:02
  • 3
    @TravisJ Any "effective technological measures" to prevent copying (including DRM, which is used on all Amazon Kindle material, AFAIK) is sufficient to violate any Creative Commons license. If there's some way to turn off Amazon's DRM for your own book (I'm skeptical), then they might be okay, as long as they adhere to the requirement you specify in your answer.
    – apsillers
    Oct 6 '14 at 13:05

If you don't like this way to stop it is to compete with it.

The exhaustive list of topics and boilerplate blurbs suggests that this is probably auto-generated by someone who doesn't care much about the quality and is hoping to sucker people who want a cheap book on, say, Emacs. If he has done something like take the most upvoted questions and answers in each tag, this probably makes for a very repetitive and not very useful book in many cases.

But imagine how useful books based on well curated collections of SO questions and answers could be:

  • Get the C++ mentality from scratch
  • 100 SQL Gotchas
  • The Collected Wisdom of Jon Skeet
  • Everything you need to know about Android development

All it takes is a good idea about what questions would fit together in a book, a lot of searching and browsing, and a little bit of scraping and formatting. I'm somewhat surprised that StackExchange doesn't already do this, and I think that anyone who is at least a bit of an expert in any one subject could make a great book quite quickly. It's also pretty easy to get your book on Amazon or other book-selling sites nowadays. Make sure you obey the conditions of the license!


I for a while was seriously considering doing this myself. But I saw 2 challenges.

1) Amazon prohibits selling a book you can yet for free elsewhere. I'm not sure what they were targeting here or how they enforce it, but a book that is primarily repackaged content is at risk of conflicting with this rule.

2) If I actually put any effort into my compilation, e.g. I edited the answers for grammar, English, removed comments that no longer pertain, then anyone could take my SO derived book and resell it for $1 less, on Amazon even. So there is a huge incentive to not put much effort into improving the content by better editing, arranging, etc.

As for the indignation about people making money off of SO content-- I'd note that SO is not a charitable institution, they are a for profit business. The license does not call on users of the CC content to be not for profit organizations that give you a warm fuzzy feeling. They people re-use CC content might be cannibals and nazis and use the answers for summoning the devil, (at least the the PHP answers)


This isn't really an answer because the legal angle has been covered, but I would like to believe that there is more than cold law to this. Surely this is a morally bankrupt act and cannot possibly be in the spirit of Creative Commons? It's not like this guy is spreading humanity's works of art to a wider audience: he's making money off wisdom and expertise that somebody else decided to share freely. If that's really what the licence allows then perhaps it should not be the licence we use.

  • 1. It's too late: you can't revoke the license on previously published content. And a new license for new content only would be humongously confusing. Unless each post has a license disclaimer, which would add a lot of clutter. 2. Let's all 0-star review this guy on amazon and report it all the way back to the steamy dark pit whence it came for not respecting SA.
    – rubenvb
    Nov 20 '14 at 12:29
  • @rubenvb: Clearly it would have to be for new content only, though I accept that it would be prohibitively complex. I'm mostly venting because I really do find this behaviour despicable. Just because something is strictly legal doesn't mean it should be done and accepted. I prefer 2. :) Nov 20 '14 at 12:36
  • 1
    The links to Amazon aren't working anymore, so I'm suspecting they realized, upon receiving a complain, that it wasn't legal or they didn't want to find out if it was (bet they lawyers have better things to work on). Nov 20 '14 at 13:32
  • @JonathanDrapeau: Lol, that solves that. I think it's more likely, though, that the individual concerned took them off himself, as I drew his attention to this topic a short time ago and the change appears to have been made since then. Nov 20 '14 at 13:34
  • 1
    I don't have any problem with this, if the author is playing by the rules: attributing the authors and making the license clear. I don't see how you can block this case without blocking beneficial cases. Here, the "editor" provides (nominal) curation, and believes his curation efforts are worth the cost of the book. If you don't agree, don't buy the book and get your Stack Overflow content right from the source. I think there can be some cases of legitimately valuable curation, and there's no way to allow it without also allowing crappy curation (since the value of curation is subjective).
    – apsillers
    Nov 20 '14 at 16:40
  • @apsillers: "don't buy the book and get your Stack Overflow content right from the source" doesn't in any way address my feeling of having been taken advantage of. I acknowledge that there are, strictly speaking, "valid cases" here and that this may well even be one of them. Nov 20 '14 at 16:44

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