Who owns what we post?
Nobody. It’s a public forum, anyone can take what you said and use it as their own.
From technical side, instance admins, community moderators, and you have the ability to remove them.
In very limited circumstances. While copyright applies automatically, it has to be registered with the Copyright Office for you to be able to enforce it. I doubt Lemmy posters register each of their posts with the Copyright Office.
The World Copyright Office then?
Oh wait, three seconds of googling suggests my posts are most likely covered when I post via my home instance in Australia.
“You don’t need to register for copyright in Australia. The moment an idea or creative concept is documented on paper or electronically it is automatically protected by copyright in Australia. Copyright protection is free and automatic under the Copyright Act 1968.”
Might we easily make it more clear that the poster or the server owns them outright?
Hypothetically, a corporation federates and wants to monetize my posts. Can they do this? I’m not personally fixated on ownership (which could easily be viewed as my systemic privilege), but the pathway out of this type of thought in general doesn’t seem to be yielding all power to already powerful growth-based corporations. I didn’t create the current systems, but I do acknowledge their existence.
Anywhere where you’re a repeat customer is probably selling your data. Any service you repeatedly use could also sell your data. Unfortunately it’s just a way of life these days.
Who says that no-one is sucking up all of the Lemmy data right now and selling it to some entity? There is no way of knowing and there is no way to combat it.
Well, let’s see what the ToS says. sh.itjust.works here.
Legal:
TBD
Oh.
To add to this, can we “disown” what we post? If it can be used against me but isn’t “mine”, it just seems like I’m always getting the short end of the stick.
As far as any legal liability, no, unless you’re successfully anonymous (VPN, tor, etc)
So shouldn’t some of the legal repercussions be shared with whomever “owns” what I post?
Generally you own what you post, but you have given a license to the site to display and use it. In the US, social media sites are protected by something called Section 230. This allows sites to display user-generated content without being liable for legal issues related to it, as long as they do a decent job of trying to moderate clearly illegal content.
I host my own instance and use the Creative Commons Non-Commerical license on my content. The idea is that this makes federation with other non-commercial instances no problem, but as soon as an instance mixes in ads in the feed, they (technically) can’t show my posts alongside it.
I know Pixelfed has a license field for every post/picture so you get fine grained control, but I don’t believe this is the case for the Mastodon API yet, so I have added the license information in my bio. It would be nice to attach license information to individual posts, and to assign a default license.
My hope is that this will make it more difficult for Meta and the like to mix in ads with my content. Time will tell if it works 😆
Thanks for sharing. I honestly was wondering how people were thinking about this. I was wondering why not include a license specified per post in the client UI as that seemed quite explicit. Yet, I was wondering how this might prohibit federation from being controlled at the server level.
I had considered ads in clients and llm training. Both of which, people in need should be paid for if it is using content they generated if at all possible.
Others have expanded, but it may be useful to try to break out of the typical idea of ownership.
But everything has to be owned by someone! Otherwise how could it be worth anything?
(I’m being sarcastic, but alas, I expect there really are people with that mindset. I often see people who are absolutely incensed that someone could use their posts to train an AI without them somehow getting the microscopic fraction of a penny that the AI might eventually make, for example)
