Adding copyright to your posts is cringe and ultimately doesn't do anything more than the facebook message chains saying "I don't consent to X Y and Z"
this post was submitted on 09 Apr 2024
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Federation means making copies. Hundreds of them. If you attach a copyright license to a comment then each and every instance that federates your comment would have to abide by it. That is just not possible. If you want to write stuff on the internet and copyright it, start a blog or something. By posting on the fediverse you implicitly allow copying.
If you don't post one, all copyrights are reserved by the author and is automatically granted upon publication in most jurisdictions around the world. So every federated instance is violating every copyright.
That is unless it's seen as fair use, in which case it doesn't matter what licensing the author wants to provide because the use is protected.
You can't rely on fair use because fair use works differently around the world, if it exists at all.
As for copyright, you agree to terms & conditions when you sign up for your fediverse account. These should include language that grants permission to use everything you submit for federation.
Instance hosters are currently relying on fair use since there's been no agreements when I've signed up.
Maybe. I don't think anyone's thought that far ahead yet. At least the lemmy devs give hosters the option to add a click through agreement to the signup page.
There is an issue which discusses this: https://github.com/LemmyNet/lemmy/issues/4298
That's a robust discussion, very useful. Thanks.
I am sceptical of the idea. If every post had a specific license, it would be a minefield to federate or host, because every post could potentially forbid sharing it, or have other stipulations.
Most posts and comments are not copyrightable anyway. A few sentences are not enough to count as a "creative work". It would need to be your entire posting history, and even then its dubious if that counts as one work.
I propose instead that we do it like wikipedia and others, and that the server as a whole has a license.
Why would anyone care? I don't give a rats ass what anyone has in their signature.
This seems like the kind of thing that would be ideal to be built into Lemmy (or whatever other fediverse product) and set at an instance level. Pick an instance which sets a policy you agree with, have it automatically applied to every post and comment made on that instance, and critically have it not displayed as comment text on every single post you see when browsing.
The main gripe that people seem to have with having it in a comment's text is that it's just noise to most readers, this seems like it could solve that issue.
incorporated into the UI, rather than a piece of text in the post.
How would other instances (or other ActivityPub software) know about it if it's not a piece of text in the post?
Might need to extend ActivityPub a little...
It's a valid idea for posts with original content. With all the pearls I cast before swine, I probably should at least put a CC-BY-ND license on my—ahem—humble screeds.
If you're suggesting this becomes a part of the UI, unless you know how to program I'd say get in line.
I don't know (because I don't really care) if over in the Lemmy laboratory they're working adding an email-like automatic signature option but if so, you could always add your license of choice as a signature. Ciao!
Rather than being limited to posts themselves it probably makes more sense to attach it to certain chunks of something. For example a block of code so that people copying the code to use in their own projects after receiving help actually have the license to do so rather than that just being verbal (could make it default to MIT No Attribution or some other license the community specifies). This same logic can be extended to images (although probably with no default for those since theres way too many possible cases)
I think this is a great idea, and something that should probably be incorporated in a wide variety of ActivityPub integrations.
I know at least Funkwhale already includes license information - maybe it could be integrated in a way that is compatible with how it's solved there?
I'll check out how Funkwhale did it, thanks!
To me, such a thing should be the default, so that anybody wanting to quote an item would know, without having to succeed in contacting the source, whether it is possible.
This would enable journalism to do a better job, for 1 thing.
Fully agree. Let people put in their license choice. The person you‘re seeing with this is [email protected] i think.
Have a good one.