To which extent can I use my own codes after I quit?

Question

According to how I understand the fineprint under this link and the rules of the web site, when I delete my account the rights of my answers will belong to the site. So if anyone, including me, ever decides to use these codes, they would technically be required to mention some stackexchange. This is not what I want. So I am wondering what my options are. Some thoughts:

1. I could keep my account and edit my answers to become useless. This may work but is absolutely not what I want. The users of this site deserve better.
2. I could just ignore these rules. But then I expose myself to legal trouble.

None of these options seem to be acceptable to me. Is there a way to make sure that anyone, including me, can use these codes without mentioning stackexchange?

Answer 1

I think the site is clear that you retain copyright, so as Joseph has already said, you are free to do anything with your own codes, including using them or making them available to others at a different location under a different (or same) licence.

It's worth noting that option 1 is not really available: even if you edit or delete the text anyone with a moderate rep can see the post history and access the original post. Anyone with no rep at all can access it if it's been picked up by wayback machine or similar archives. I don't think option 2 is really applicable as the licence rules place no constraints on you only on others.

Answer 2

The site license says that when you post code, the material is available to others under the CC-SA conditions. That means that for example you can't simply 'pull' all of the content: important so that the material remains available for others, and particularly reflects the fact that as others can edit, it's hard to say content is '100% yours'.

However, you retain copyright on material you post that you wrote. In particular, with code, provided it's 100% material you wrote, you remain free to use it under an alternate license. That's for example how companies offer GPL and commercial license versions of code: the copyright holder is not restricted by the license, it's other people who are.

Conclusion: you are free to use your code how you like. It's everyone else who has to respect the CC-SA (unless you've given them explicit permission otherwise: for example, I view my contributions as 'public domain' so make my code available as CC0). So you can use in closed source, re-license as MIT, LPPL, GPL, ... or whatever.

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As I say, you are copyright owner. You could therefore re-post your material elsewhere on a site you control. For example, I have various postings to my own blog, where I set the rules and which is explicitly CC0 (see https://www.texdev.net/about/). If you do that now, you'd be be able to show from timestamps that the material was posted before any account removal here.

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To be clear on the copyright part, the terms say

All materials displayed or performed on the public Network, including but not limited to text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, software or source code, audio and video, and animations (collectively “Network Content”) (other than Network Content posted by individual “Subscriber Content”) are the property of Stack Overflow and/or third parties and are protected by United States and international copyright laws (“Stack Overflow Content”).

They then go on to describe Subscriber Content:

You agree that any and all content, including without limitation any and all text, graphics, logos, tools, photographs, images, illustrations, software or source code, audio and video, animations, and product feedback (collectively, “Content”) that you provide to the public Network (collectively, “Subscriber Content”), is perpetually and irrevocably licensed to Stack Overflow on a worldwide, royalty-free, non-exclusive basis pursuant to Creative Commons licensing terms (CC-BY-SA), and you grant Stack Overflow the perpetual and irrevocable right and license to access, use, process, copy, distribute, export, display and to commercially exploit such Subscriber Content, even if such Subscriber Content has been contributed and subsequently removed by you as reasonably necessary to, for example (without limitation):

importantly saying non-exclusive, which can only reasonably be interpreted as the author retaining copyright.

Answer 3

Do not do option one. The code will not be destroyed, but there are no good automated systems to repair the damage. This means SE employees, site moderators, and high rep users will have to do a lot of work to repair the vandalism.

As for legal trouble, I don't think you need to worry. In countries in which there is a presumption of innocence, in order to get into legal trouble someone would have to prove that you don't own the code and you wouldn't have to prove that you owned the code. It would be extremely difficult for a 3rd party to fabricate ownership. If SE wanted to claim ownership, they would have to falsify their logs and find an employee that was willing to perjure themselves and say they wrote the code. To blow them out of the water all you would have to do is prove ownership of a single one of your answers (e.g., the code was originally in one of your packages or you used it in an archived document). Given that the code is already open source, the potential benefits to SE seem not worth potential criminal liability. If you want slightly better protection, keep your account. Just re-register it to an email you don't use and make all your questions and answers CW so you don't accumulate reputation. This still doesn't fully protect you against SE trying to steal you identity as they can still delete your account and fabricate the logs.

Following on that, deleting your account does not really accomplish anything. Your questions and answers will still exist. They can still be voted on and edited. It makes it more difficult for future users to find your great answers since there is no user page from which to branch out. As above, I suggest you re-register the account to some email you don't use frequently (or just filter emails from SE), change your username to user121799 and remove your profile.

Answer 4

First of all it should be noted that since you are the author of your codes, you will retain the full copyright under any normal jurisdiction (except maybe Cuba or North Korea). At this point it is completely irrelevant what the TeX.SX FAQ or whatever says, because they are not above the law. This is also a common misconception and people think it is necessary to put lines like

% Copyright (c) 2019 John Doe

in their files. This is in fact superfluous because you own the implicit copyright to any file you have authored. The same applies to your TeX.SX posts. Whether you have an account on this site does not matter. Your are the author of the codes, hence you have the full copyright.

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The only exception is if you have forfeited your copyright as it is common in big open source project by means of a Contributor License Agreement (CLA). The purpose of a CLA is that an author transfers the copyright of their contribution to the project to prevent patent trolling, i.e. a contributor submits a contribution and after it is accepted in to the project the contributor files a patent for that contribution and sues the project for infringement.