About 5 years ago, StackOverflow messed up and declared that they were making all content submitted by users available under CC-BY-SA 4.0 [1]. The error here is that the users-content agreement was that all users' contributions are made available under CC-BY-SA 3.0 (and not anything about later). In the middle there were also some licensing problems concerning code vs noncode that were confusing.
I remember thinking that if any of the super answerers really wanted, they could have tried to sue for illegally making their answers available under a different license. But I thought that without any damages, this probably wasn't likely to succeed.
But now I wonder whether making all content available to AI scrapers and OpenAI in particular might be enough to actually base a case. As far as I can tell, StackOverflow continued being duplicitous with what license applies to what content for half of the year 2018 and the first few months of the year 2019. Their current licensing suggests CC-BY-SA 3.0 for things before May 5 2018, and CC-BY-SA 4.0 for things after. Sometime in early 2019 (if memory serves, it was after the meta post I link to), they made users login again and accept a new license agreement for relicensing content. But those middle months are murky.
I remember thinking that if any of the super answerers really wanted, they could have tried to sue for illegally making their answers available under a different license. But I thought that without any damages, this probably wasn't likely to succeed.
But now I wonder whether making all content available to AI scrapers and OpenAI in particular might be enough to actually base a case. As far as I can tell, StackOverflow continued being duplicitous with what license applies to what content for half of the year 2018 and the first few months of the year 2019. Their current licensing suggests CC-BY-SA 3.0 for things before May 5 2018, and CC-BY-SA 4.0 for things after. Sometime in early 2019 (if memory serves, it was after the meta post I link to), they made users login again and accept a new license agreement for relicensing content. But those middle months are murky.
I should emphasize that I know nothing.
[1]: https://meta.stackexchange.com/q/333089/205676