this post was submitted on 16 May 2024
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I'm not a lawyer. But isn't the reason they had to go to reddit to get permission is because users hand over over ownership to reddit the moment you post. And since there's no such clause on Lemmy, they'd have to ask the actual authors of the comments for permission instead?
Mind you, I understand there's no technical limitation that prevents bots from harvesting the data, I'm talking about the legality. After all, public does not equate public domain.
Not ownership. Just permission to copy and distribute freely. Which basically is necessary to run a service like this, where user-submitted content is displayed.
It's more of a fuzzy area, but simply by posting on a federated service you're agreeing to let that service copy and display your comments, and sync with other servers/instances to copy and display your comments to their users. It's baked into the protocol, that your content will be copied automatically all over the internet.
Does that imply a license to let software be run on that text? Does it matter what the software does with it, like display the content in a third party Mobile app? What about when it engages in text to speech or braille conversion for accessibility? Or index the page for a search engine? Does AI training make any difference at that point?
The fact is, these services have APIs, and the APIs allow for the efficient copying and ingest of the user-created information, with metadata about it, at scale. From a technical perspective obviously scraping is easy. But from a copyright perspective submitting your content into that technical reality is implicit permission to copy, maybe even for things like AI training.
Thanks for that clarification. I was afraid it would be that murky.
Well the legality seems to be something you can ignore when you have billions of dollars in VC money to fritter around.
It certainly didn't stop them hoovering up music and movies, and the owners of those have a lot more power than any of us do.
Tech is fast, the law is slow, and you can make many times the cost of lawyers and fines by the time anybody gets around to telling you to stop it.
Well even if it was a legal argument, they wouldn't care. Like Facebook and all the rest. They say they don't share your data but we all know that's a lie
They are public communication platforms, how could they not share your data publicly?
Not all your data should be public