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The site http://touchstack.com/tex.stackexchange/questions seems to be reposting all our questions and answers (and http://touchstack.com seems to do it for the other Stack Exchange sites, too). I do not like this, but the real question is: Is that legal? (If it isn't: What can be done about it?)

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    This is possibly a matter for "upstairs", ie meta.SO. I recommend posting it there and linking to that post here (I'd quite like to know the answer). Mar 25, 2012 at 18:51
  • This could be tagged as "status-completed", see the answer of Thomas McDonald and my comment to it.
    – Stephen
    Mar 27, 2012 at 14:39
  • Voting to close as too localized since the web site in question doesn’t exist anymore.
    – doncherry
    Feb 2, 2013 at 16:29

3 Answers 3

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Yes, I'm very much in the wrong here. Touchstack was originally intended to be a smartphone web client for Stack Exchange sites (using the API), but I ended up rushing it out so I could show it to a few people. I posted it on Stack Apps as a work in progress, intending to update it over the next few days and bring in a lot of features that were missing. It so happened attribution was one of the key things that was missing.

As per life, I ended up moving onto other projects (amongst schoolwork, university application etc, arguably much more important) and completely forgot about Touchstack. Then SE mobile shipped, and any impetus I had for working on anything to do with Touchstack was long gone. Attribution was somewhere in a long list of forgotten updates for the project.

Needless to say, since an official version of mobile SE was released there is little-to-no point of Touchstack - it's just wasting Heroku's resources. I was going to leave it to rot once the domain expired in May, and so instead of updating it now, I'd rather just kill it off.

So yes, I'm sorry for misusing your content without correct attribution. The issue will go away shortly.

Also do check out Stack Apps if you get some time, it's full of other cool things.

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    Thank you for the clarification!
    – Caramdir
    Mar 26, 2012 at 21:29
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    Ditto: with added appreciation for stopping by to let us know. Mar 27, 2012 at 9:44
  • As I know about Who's behind TouchStack now, this is no longer an issue for me. There was no link to some "About us"/"Legal"/"Digital Imprint" or something similar, and there was a case of copying the English Language & Usage site. Thank you for the clarification!
    – Stephen
    Mar 27, 2012 at 14:36
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It looks pretty much legal to me, have a look at who's behind TouchStack. At least, it has been created through the SX web app system, and it looks ok with the moderators. One should also note that it does not seem to be importing the actual questions – more like, it seems to access them through Stack Exchange.

Regarding what is legal or not, all contributions to this site are subject to a Creative Commons Licence, which clearly states that anyone can copy and redistribute the work as long as they provide attribution.

So, it does not seem to me that they are doing anything wrong from a legal point of view, although one could argue that they should make it plainer that it all comes from Stack Exchange sites (by providing back links and an info page, for instance)… but then again, it looks like that app is still very much in beta. You could ask the developer to provide such information, though.

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    They don't provide any attribution at all. And they don't provide any license information. In other words, they violate both clauses of CC BY-SA.
    – Caramdir
    Mar 25, 2012 at 20:48
  • @Caramdir They do imply which site it comes from, and they say who posted the answer, but this definitely very unclear and it does not allow visitors to trace the posts back to their original author. Stating clearly and visibly that it is affiliated to Stack Exchange, and under which licence, would probably suffice, though (as it would be enough for a reasonably diligent reader to get to the actual information). What I meant is that, although they are clearly careless, it wouldn't be very difficult to put it right. But some one of us should definitely request it from them.
    – ienissei
    Mar 25, 2012 at 21:07
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    The required attribution is listed here: blog.stackoverflow.com/2009/06/attribution-required I'd agree that they don't seem to be malicious (e.g. there are no ads!), but it still doesn't comply with the license.
    – Caramdir
    Mar 25, 2012 at 21:27
  • @Caramdir Yes, I read that post sometime earlier, and I thoroughly agree that someone should ask them to provide proper attribution. The rules might be somewhat different for pages that simply load stuff and display it (versus someone actually citing something). But that does imply some direct links and some non equivocal sign of the CC Licence, for sure.
    – ienissei
    Mar 25, 2012 at 21:45
  • If who's behind TouchStack would be linked (or the information immediate available at TouchStack), the question would not have arisen in the first place. Thanks for the link, now it is OK with me.
    – Stephen
    Mar 26, 2012 at 7:36
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All posts on all stackexchange sites are under the CC license, originally v2.something, now v3.0. This license allows to share and adapt the content freely. You accepting this license when posting things here. I don't think the stackexchange people have anything against this. They actually provide an API to access all posts and touchstack seems to use it.

Looking at https://stackapps.com/questions/2478/touch-stack-smartphone-optimised-stack-exchange this sites seems to target smartphones and simply provide all posts in an format optimised for them. So this is apparently a feature not a bug, aeh break of copyright.

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