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this post was submitted on 13 Dec 2023
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And it's how federation is supposed to work. Either you want to send your content to other instances or you don't. But federation is the wrong tool if you want to stay alone. You can defederate and block them if you don't like their terms.
Even without federation / specific protocols. You can just take about any sort of content on the internet pretty easily if you wanted to. Search engine crawlers do something similar, otherwise search results would just not work at all.
Couldn't instances or accounts just license their content? Like would it be legally binding if I write in my profile that all the content I wrote here is licensed under a specific CC license?
Genius (the lyrics company) tried to license the content on their website and a judge said that can't be legally binding because there's no guarantee the scraper read it. It seems like the same would apply here.
Seriously doubt that. If I pirate a book, game or TV series and don't read the copyright, it's still illegal. Same should apply to other written text like on a website.
Copyright is a law. Everything is copyrighted, with or without the little (C). Licensing is a peer-to-peer contract. Unless you can prove the other side is aware of and agreed to a contract, it doesn't bind them.
Notably, licensing often is needed because general copyright exists. The license grants them the right to copy your full text or whatever, and if they didn't agree to it, then they had no right to copy it. There are exceptions for excerpts and search indexing and the like, but they can't (legally) just take all your posts because you put them online.
That all said, big companies have already been doing mass copyright violations for AI, so copyright or licenses don't necessarily mean anything unless you can force them to comply. There are lawsuits on AI scraping now. Because the end result is either making up some reason that copyright doesn't ban copying if you do enough of it or making LLMs effectively illegal and putting some massive corporations on the hook for mass violations against basically everyone online, I wouldn't personally bet the courts ruling against the corporations.
It looks like I was mixing up some facts. The Genius case was denied because genius doesn't own the copyright to the lyrics they were publishing. I can't find the case now, but there was a case where a judge said scraping was allowed because it wasn't a given that the scraper had read a ToS.
What if it was built into the website? Like included in the HTML or something?
We should open a feature request. An additional license selection field upon posting on Lemmy, or a default setting to license every post and comment from a user account would be awesome. And free/libre culture fits well within this ecosystem.
That would be great. It would be similar to choosing a language for each post.