https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/26410290525...

Reddit may presume that the user holds the copyright and is legally able to grant a license, but it isn't necessarily so. There are users who set their avatar to "Baby Yoda", or posted 3 paragraphs they transcribed from their print edition of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, or just copied photos from their classmate's phone camera app without asking.

If you look through Flickr you will find many photos and collections with fake licenses. All those sites you Google that advertise "Free Public Domain Clip Art / Stock Photos" maintain plausible deniability. Look through any wiki on Fandom.com and see whether the film studios go after their most ardent fans who upload dozens of stills and screenshots to promote The Twilight Saga or something.

In 1990 I wrote a configuration file to assist me in using GNU Emacs. I wrote and debugged it from scratch, in my free time, on my family's dime. I decided that it had a broad enough application to be useful to other Emacs users, so I submitted it to the developers. They included the file in a subsequent release of Emacs 18, and it was there for a decade or more.

My submission had been quite informal and, while I'd included some self-attribution at the top of the file, there was no explicit LICENSE or GPL or assignment of copyright. By submitting it to the developers of GNU Emacs for distribution, I had implicitly licensed it via the same GPL.

However, this informality was not enough to pass an audit later. By ca. 2010, they combed through the sources and removed the file I had submitted, along with others, because they were unable to track down the explicit licensing or copyright assignments that were seen as necessary by then.

https://www.gnu.org/licenses/why-assign.html

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