What is the Legal copyright on a Lemmy Post? - eviltoast

Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this necessary, or is the creator the automatic copyright owner? Does adding the copyright/license information do anything?

Please note if you have legal credentials in your reply. (I’m in the USA, but I’d be interested to hear about other jurisdictions if there are differences)

  • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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    6 months ago

    Right, you keep using Lemmy.world and the safe harbor stuff. I’m not on Lemmy.world. I’m on my own server, and I don’t agree to their terms or rules or anything. That’s super you retain ownership there, but then lemmy.world hands it off to me, or anyone, who does not have those rules in place. Who cares what lemmy.world said? I didn’t sign a ToS when I spun up my server.

    and that license is on the content, not on the server, so as that content is federated, that license travels with it and is still in action, and must be abided by.

    Who cares? My server says you forego that license, and if they wanted to keep it licensed then they shouldn’t have sent it to me.

    and from your bolded thing, yes, that is what I’m saying, it’d be extremely easy to “money launder” any text that comes through my server, because that’s what can and is happening right now. They can talk to congress if they want, I don’t think there are any laws right now preventing that. That’s my entire point.

    I agree with you in your last point, there is a new wrinkle to it, but as of this point, right now, I don’t believe a license, tos, or anything applies for data willingly given to me. Should it? Probably, that’s a new area, and it probably will stay status quo, but unless someone can show me where in their laws that ownership still exists in this case, I don’t think it matters.

    We have two conflicting agreements in this example. One from Lemmy.World saying you retain ownership, one from another server who receives data but clearly states that by giving them data you release all licenses. At this point, I don’t think there are any actual laws protecting you or your content. Adding a license at the bottom I believe is a placebo. Until this area of the law is fleshed out, I wouldn’t trust that anything I put here wouldn’t go to it. Now I personally don’t care, I think that’s a small cost for having a free P2P system, that there will be a few bad actors, but I get to others that they will care heavily. To those like you who care, then I say at this point in the fediverse, I’d call your license pretty much toilet paper.

    (Again, I use the term “my server” as just an example, just to play devil’s advocate. I of course don’t do anything with the data or my user’s data)

    • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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      6 months ago

      Who cares what lemmy.world said?

      It’s where the content was initially posted, so any terms of service would be applicable to the content at the time of posting. That’s why.

      The onus is on the Federated server receiving the content that’s already licensed to reject the content if they do not want to abide by the license. If they accept the content, they have to abide by the license.

      And as far as the rest of you diatribe, I’ll just remind you that licenses can’t just be stripped from content because some third-party TOS says it can.

      We would have seen much ‘money laundering’ style mayhem on the Internet with other people’s content before today, if that was possible.

      I think we’ve discussed this enough, so I’m just going to leave it with an ‘agree to disagree’, and move on.

      Have a nice day.

      Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)

      • Scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech
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        6 months ago

        I added this as an edit, but I think it’s fair to reply, I agree to the disagree, for fun I ran this through GPT just to see what it’d say. Not that I would trust it to be correct ever, but it’s interesting getting an “outside opinion” about this.

        I’ll paraphrase the wall of text, but it looks like we’re both honestly correct. (If we trust chatgpt)

        Right now, there is no law specifically for this scenario, so it will go unchecked until it gets challenged in court. In court, they will usually go off of the first place a user signed, so in this case lemmy.world, with the caveat that my server can override that if terms are presented and accepted by you, the user. There is no mechanism for that, so it would probably lose in court. However, the enforcement of such is pretty much nil, and getting it to court is a problem by itself.

        So, I think we’re both right. I think you are right in terms of what should be happening, and the laws should be expanded to include federated content, and I think I’m right in that it’s impossible to expect privacy until the law catches up and puts it in writing.

        One important thing for you, specifically though, is that your link at the bottom is more or less useless. All of these are based on the server, your server owner’s rules are what matter, what you leave in the comment does not. So if you chose Lemmy.world because of how they handle user privacy, awesome, that’s what will hold up in court. A license in the comment from what I see, probably will do nothing.

        Anyway, I agree, we can leave it be. The only thing I’d encourage for you is to not trust that anything you put here is private or safe, this is not a walled garden, even if it’s not legal anyone can have a server and be listening to our data, or training, or whatever. Just, be careful what you put out here.

        • Cosmic Cleric@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          for fun I ran this through GPT just to see what it’d say. Not that I would trust it to be correct ever, but it’s interesting getting an “outside opinion” about this.

          I’m don’t believe an “outside opinion” from an AI company’s product, about if an AI company has the legal right to ignore a content’s license and scrape the content to program their models, would be unbiased, and should not be trusted, as you’ve stated.

          Attempting to agree to disagree, and move on.

          Anti Commercial-AI license (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)