Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this necessary, or is the creator the automatic copyright owner? Does adding the copyright/license information do anything?
Please note if you have legal credentials in your reply. (I’m in the USA, but I’d be interested to hear about other jurisdictions if there are differences)
In legal terms, what does that mean? Every post is presumed to be public domain? Or in the process of posting, is there an implied license to generate unlimited copies for the purposes of federation? If someone likes a post and decides to make it into a chapter in their book, which they sell, is the original author entitled to attribution? To compensation?
I would argue that yes, you’re posting publicly on a public forum, whose contents are shotgunned out to any listening servers/apis/whoever.
If this were in a courtroom, I’d expect the defense to say that the poster chose to post it on a public forum which was then shared with whoever was listening, that there was no way to expect it to remain private, and there is could be no assumption of privacy with the way it was shared.
For enforcement, there is no way to enforce any sort of licensing with the fediverse model, you handed your post to me, if you didn’t want your post handled in a certain way then the response is “Why did you hand it out in the first place?”. If someone did make your post into a book, then it’s on you, the poster, to make the case that what they did was wrong, and I think it’s enough of a grey area here to say that they were simply listening. To flip it around, what if their server has posted terms saying “Anything you give to us will be used for training and publishing.” You sent it out to anyone listening, they posted their terms, who is right then?
This is different from normal social media where you posted to a walled garden, where you’re bound by just their terms. Now any server can have any rules or terms, and we’re blasting our data out to all of them (unless they are explicitly defederated)