Stackoverflow, and the rest of the SE network, explicitly says that all user-generated content is licensed under CC-BY-SA. (link here). So, while SE has the right to do whatever they want with user content, they have to attribute the users who made it, and they have to keep the same or similar open license on the content. I know users can’t really fight a big company on equal footing, but an explicit license like that is an implicit commitment to respecting, at least to some degree, users’ ownership of their content.
On the other hand, Reddit’s user agreement includes this: “…you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content…” So, reddit asserts the right to use user content however it likes, with no rights to the users who generate it.
Recent events make me much more interested in knowing how the content I generate will be licensed. I know a cc license on Reddit content wouldn’t change most of what makes the recent decisions so terrible, but it would give some standing to the people upset with how reddit plans to use what they’ve contributed.
I looked a bit, but didn’t see an explicit statement about how the content in this server (lemmy.world) is licensed. (That’s not a criticism; I think the admins have been busy with a few other things, and I really appreciate it!! I’m asking about this because I’m hoping to see more and more here.)
The terms-of-use on every lemmy server I’ve seen would be considered underdeveloped by any lawyer I’ve ever met. Pragmatically:
- In the absence of a TOU that requires licensing content to participate, content posted directly to a lemmy server would probably get whatever the default treatment is either in the jurisdiction where the post was made or where the server is hosted (or maybe even that depends on the jurisdiction of each in complex ways). In the US that would mean all content is all-rights-reserved by default.
- But the poster/commenter isn’t going to try to enforce their rights against lemmy. If they didn’t want the content there, they wouldn’t have put it there. And if they changed their mind they can delete it. And if they refuse to delete it themselves but contact an admin/mod… probably the admin/mod will just delete it for them.
- If the jurisdiction where the instance is hosted has a safe-harbor framework of some kind (like the US does), that would provide some protection from copyright claims on user-generated content provided the admins followed the requirements to be eligible (which I think most admins do even if they don’t know it).
- Images and media hosted elsewhere but hotlinked from Lemmy may have their own TOU’s (like imgur or whatever).
Overall, I’d say most of the lemmyverse has underbaked policy frameworks. The de-facto results function ok pragmatically anyway for what lemmy does on its own. Any scraping/reuse of content from Lemmy would have to navigate a very complex, confusing, and ambiguous licensing landscape. Probably 10y from now, if the Lemmyverse continues to grow, TOU’s will be more common and more clear about open-licensing content or leaving it all-rights-reserved but giving lemmy a perpetual irrevocable non-exclusive right to distribute whatever you post here (the latter of which is more or less what’s implicitly happening today).
Yeah, this matches my impression. Hopefully it won’t take 10 years! I was sort of thinking that an explicit statement of open license would encourage some people that it’s worth putting their content here.
… explicit statement of open license would encourage some people that it’s worth putting their content here.
I suspect you’ll find this is a double-edged sword. Open-licensing frameworks quite deliberately set out requirements for re-use, and are agnostic about who can do so. Many lemmings have strong feelings about who good actors and bad actors are, irrespective of whether they meet policy requirements. It’s all fun and games until nazilemmy starts their own fediverse and seeds it with all our comments and posts as allowed by the open-license.
Personally, I’m a believer in policies that enable both usage you agree with and usage you disagree with on equal terms, but that’s not a selling point to everyone in the lemmyverse. All rights reserved with a carve-out for lemmy to distribute offers less wiggle room for abuse (and use). I’m not real opinionated about terms, but I do agree more clarity would be useful.
That’s a good point, but I think it’s also another motivation to have some explicit statement of licensing: people who prefer a different license will know they should move to a different home instance.
Considering the duplication of content across instances and how other instances can interact with any particular magazine’s content, it might make the most sense for every magazine to have its own content license in it’s sidebar and posting/commenting to that magazine is enforced under the magazine’s license
Apart from the license question compliance is an additional minefield. The European Pivacy Protection Supervisor last communicated on the Fediverse last year and they were cautiously optimistic but not overly detailed on the real life consequences.
I run an instance, never even thought of this. I suppose technically I have no rights to the content, not that I ever intended to “use” this data.
I mean, it’s all very new, but worth considering eventually I think. There are some who would say that you own all the content on your server, so an explicit statement otherwise might not be a bad idea :)
Yeah. I don’t know what the answer here is or what it should be, but it’s good that someone brings this up.
At least in the US, if something is very obvious in how it’s going to be used, an implicit license for that purpose is given.
What counts as obvious depends on the judge, though.
I guess my only worry is that if they do add something like a BY-SA-NC 4.0 license, then technically all the old posts aren’t under that license.
Yeah, if the admins want to specify a license, sooner is better. The stackoverflow content is actually governed by three licenses, as they changed over time, and so they just list date ranges for each one.
The creators are believers in copyleft, so I’d assume your stuff becomes public domain.
Copyleft is nothing like public domain. Licenses like the GPL would be considered copyleft, where the license itself is required to be maintained when distributing the work, allowing access to the sources that made the work.
It’s also something that would have to be explicitly stated in the Terms of Service or something similar.
I assumed it would be on an instance by instance basis.
I guess, but then federation makes it complicated.
If I have an account on instance 1 and make a post on instance 2, and someone else sees it on instance 3, each having a different set of licenses…
Lawyers always ruin everything :D
Or help if you get the ambiguity out of the way up front. So later when somebody says “hey… I’m going to use your art to sell this multi-million dollar product” or to advertise some unsavory service you’d rather not have your stuff asssociated with there’s clarity on what they could and couldn’t do. And it makes any recourse (if it requires going the legal route) easier.
Like a dentist, always cheaper and better to go with their advice in order to prevent more costly issues down the road.
I think that we should just assume at this point that if you post anything online, it will be used by other people with or without your consent.
Therefore if you want to protect your creations (whether they be text or other), you should obtain copyright for and host your content yourself or through a privately-owned service that protects your IP, then share a link or embed that content into social media. I’m not a lawyer, but I expect that this is sort-of how it would need to be. While there are some international agreements like the Berne convention that protects IP from the moment it is created, I do believe that it can both be waived by the creator in a ToS, and in order for you to pursue legal action (in the US at-least), you often need to go through the complete process of obtaining a copyright, trademark, patent, etc from the government.
While I love the ideology of copyleft and I am a socialist at heart, if you live in a capitalist economy and want to earn a living, there are compromises you have to make.
If it works anything like USSR, then you as a user don’t own anything and have no rights to anything. Same as Reddit pretty much.
