I would like to make a community dedicated to posting interesting science questions that have been asked and answered in other sites.
The post would be a copy of the question and the comments would be copies of the answers that were found to be interesting - always with the username attribution and the link to the original post.
With this format, users would not need to leave the site, and it is easy to discuss the answers directly in the comments.
But I have my doubts about whether this is appropriate, as I think that it might be copyright infringement.
So, what do people in Lemmy think? Would this format be blatant theft and wrong? Perfectly reasonable? Somewhere in between?
could it be covered by fair use, as long as it’s part of (or offering to have) a discussion about the topic?
It is an interesting point. Commentary is generally considered fair use when - for example - someone makes a video in which text is shown and the text is commented on. I think that directly copying the comments and not commenting on them would not be transformative enough to fall into fair use. But you are right that putting it up in the context of generating a new discussion could be transformative enough - but that could open loopholes (for example, displaying a full movie without permission at a public venue for the audience to critique could be considered fair sue).
But adding an explanatory comment of why that particular comment was chosen could be transformative enough to be “fair use” by most people. Looking into it, it is messy and complicated. It seems that in the end the reality is that to find out whether something is fair use or not, the commenter or platform would have to sue you and then a judge would need to decide.
But people share all sorts of screenshots on social media without it getting purged, maybe there’s some different rules?
My guess is that either the platform or the person that made the comment would need to actively sue for something to be done about that, and not many people see this as something they would want to do. I am sure most people post comments online without worrying about the copyright of their comment work.
If Reddit has not gotten rid of Removeddit, I don’t think that they particularly care about their comments being copied.