Instead of solely deleting content, what if authors had instead moved their content/answers to something self-owned? Can SO even claim ownership legally of the content on their site? Seems iffy in my own, ignorant take.
Everything you submit to StackOverflow is licensed under either MIT or CC depending on when you submitted it.
Regardless of the license (apart perhaps from public domain) it is legally still your copyright, since you produced the content. Pretty sure in EU they cannot prevent you from deleting your content.
it is legally still your copyright, since you produced the content. Pretty sure in EU they cannot prevent you from deleting your content.
They absolutely can, you gave them an explicit (under most circumstances irrevocable) permission to do so. That’s how contracts work.
Unlike in US, and I cannot speak for all of EU, but at least in Finland a contract cannot take away your legal rights.
You can when it comes to copyright. That’s EU-law and anything else would be such a horrible idea that no country would ever set up a law saying otherwise.
If you could simply revoke copyright licenses you would completely kill any practicality of selling your copyrighted works and it would fully undermine any purpose it served in the first place.
Frankly, the solution here isn’t vandalism, it’s setting up a competing side and copying the content over. The license of stackoverflow makes that explicitly legal. Anything else is just playing around and hoping that a company acts against its own interests, which has rarely ever worked before.
The license of stackoverflow makes that explicitly legal
How and why is it illegal (I will take down my post about vandlism until I discuss this.)
I’m not saying vandalism is illegal. I’m say that it borders on immoral and that there is a better, more radical (and thus effective) alternative that one might expect to be illegal but in fact isn’t.