The problem:
The web has obviously reached a high level of #enshitification. Paywalls, exclusive walled gardens, #Cloudflare, popups, CAPTCHAs, tor-blockades, dark patterns (esp. w/cookies), javascript that makes the website an app (not a doc), etc.
Status quo solution (failure):
#Lemmy & the #threadiverse were designed to inherently trust humans to only post links to non-shit websites, and to only upvote content that has no links or links to non-shit venues.
It’s not working. The social approach is a systemic failure.
The fix:
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stage 1 (metrics collection): There needs to be shitification metrics for every link. Readers should be able to click a “this link is shit” button on a per-link basis & there should be tick boxes to indicate the particular variety of shit that it is.
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stage 2 (metrics usage): If many links with the same hostname show a pattern of matching enshitification factors, the Lemmy server should automatically tag all those links with a warning of some kind (e.g. ⚠, 💩, 🌩).
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stage 3 (inclusive alternative): A replacement link to a mirror is offered. E.g. youtube → (non-CF’d invidious instance), cloudflare → archive.org, medium.com → (random scribe.rip instance), etc.
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stage 4 (onsite archive): good samaritans and over-achievers should have the option to provide the full text for a given link so others can read the article without even fighting the site.
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stage 5 (search reranking): whenever a human post a link and talks about it, search crawlers notice and give that site a high ranking. This is why search results have gotten lousy – because the social approach has failed. Humans will post bad links. So links with a high enshitification score need to be obfuscated in some way (e.g. dots become asterisks) so search crawlers don’t overrate them going forward.
This needs to be recognized as a #LemmyBug.
I mean, does archive.org get away with it, though?
They have legal troubles not infrequently and they’ve lost at least one copyright case that I know of recently.
I doubt if you pooled all the Lemmy instances’ resources that they’d have the resources to fight a copyright case.
And do I really have to spell out how Google gets away with caching stuff?
Finally, “fair use” isn’t magic words that magically absolve you of any liability in all copyright claims. I’m extremely skeptical fair use could be twisted to our defense in this particular case.
They get blocked by some sites, and some sites have pro-actively opt-out. archive.org respects the opt-outs. AFAICT, archive.org gets away w/archiving non-optout cases where their bot was permitted.
You might need to explain why 12ft.io gets away with sharing google’s cache, as Lemmy could theoretically operate the same way.
When you say “twisted”, do you mean commentary is not a standard accepted and well-known fair use scenario?
Archive.org is more than The Wayback Machine. You’re just talking about The Wayback Machine, not archive.org as a whole. Nothing I’ve said in this thread is about The Wayback Machine specifically.
My point is that archive.org does things that bend, skirt, and run afoul of copyright law (and good on them because fuck the system) and they spend more money, time, and resources fighting copyright suits than I’d imagine all Lemmy instance owners pooling their resources could afford. And that’s if they even cared enough to risk dying on that hill.
Not sure how this bit is relevant. I was speaking only about your “stage 4 (onsite archive)” item. (I thought that was pretty clear, but apparently not?) I don’t know if 12ft.io is playing with (legal) fire or not, but I’m not sure why it matters to the conversation. Nothing 12ft.io does is comparable to Lemmy users copying articles into comments.
So, I’m only going to be talking about U.S. “fair use” here because as little as I know about that, I know far far less about copyright law in other countries. That said:
First, whether fair use applies is a fairly complex matter which depends among other things on how much of the original work is copied. While maybe not technically determinitive of the validity of a fair use defense, “the whole damn article” definitely won’t help your case when you’re trying to argue a fair use defense in federal court.
Second, I think for a fair use argument to work the way you seem to be suggesting, the quoted portions of(!) the article would have to appear in the same “work” as the commentary, but I’d imagine typically all comments in a Lemmy thread would be distinct “works.” Particularly given that each comment is independently authored and mostly by distinct authors. (Copying an entire article into a comment and following it with some perfunctory “commentary” would be a pretty transparent ham-fisted attempt at a loophole. Again, a very bad look when you’re arguing your defense in federal court.) I don’t know about your Lemmy instance, but mine doesn’t seem to say anything in the legal page that could provide any argument that a thread is a single “work.” (It does say “no illegal content, including sharing copyrighted material without the explicit permission of the owner(s).”)
Precisely why archive.org should lead. Did you miss what I said about Greenpeace? Greenpeace is a relatively well-financed powerhouse in the activism arena. Greenpeace takes legal risks and tests the law in ways that small activist groups cannot. When Greenpeace proves that a form of protest can work with minimal legal risks, it paves the way for small groups to do the same. Likewise, archive.org is much bigger and better funded than Lemmy admins. So archive.org’s lead is the example by which Lemmy can follow. The Lemmy approach should not deviate too meaningfully far from archive.org’s tests.
The bug report need not to pin down precise detail on how the function is achieved at this stage. Whether users copy-paste or whether that buffer for pasting is instead populated by 12ft.io is up in the air and open to discussion. AFAIK, the copy-paste approach is sufficiently protected by the fair use doctrine. If a lawyer says otherwise, the more legally defensible solution might very well be to have a mechanism like that of 12ft.io (or via 12ft.io). At the moment it looks like only 5 people even want this functionality. Lack of interest is a bigger killer of this idea than legality, apparently.
Keep in mind that bug reporters are not necessarily lawyers. The optimum solution may differ from that envisioned by the bug reporter.
It may or may not be complex. I’m not convinced either way. I know that a common example is the case of someone copying a whole book, and then adding a one-line comment “the book was good”. That example is given to illustrate a proportionality rule. A news article is much smaller than book, and often the text generated in commentary even exceeds the size of the article. It would be premature to assume Lemmy would fail whatever legal tests have been established for that at this stage.
Actually it’s a case of many authors collaborating on a single work. No one enters a thread to see just one person’s work. They visit to see the single multi-authored work.