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.
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)
I think this is something that should be clarified in the terms of service of the instance.
You own your original ideas, technically speaking. Just other people that view the board can use the ideas, copy it, or remix it into their own ideas as well.
As an analogy, say you buy a brand new red car, and you drive it on a public street. People who take a picture of the car don’t own the car, you do of course. They, however, own the picture of your car and can sell it, copy it, post it, whatever as they please.
It’s a little more nuanced than that. My understanding in the US, if you copyright your building, a person can’t sell the picture of your building standing alone, but can sell the picture of the landscape it’s in. In your example, If you took a picture of the car and said you designed and manufactured and are trying to sell it, that’s absolutely illegal. Litigating it and getting money from it is a different matter.
