this post was submitted on 03 Mar 2024
84 points (92.9% liked)
Fediverse
27123 readers
226 users here now
A community to talk about the Fediverse and all it's related services using ActivityPub (Mastodon, Lemmy, KBin, etc).
If you wanted to get help with moderating your own community then head over to [email protected]!
Rules
- Posts must be on topic.
- Be respectful of others.
- Cite the sources used for graphs and other statistics.
- Follow the general Lemmy.world rules.
Learn more at these websites: Join The Fediverse Wiki, Fediverse.info, Wikipedia Page, The Federation Info (Stats), FediDB (Stats), Sub Rehab (Reddit Migration), Search Lemmy
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Isn't the answer just the same if you consider it as email? I mean ActivityPub is basically just email but with "social media" features. Surely lawyers already have answers to the question when it comes to email.
If I send an email to the whole world, what is anyone allowed to do with it?
In some ways, I feel like ActivityPub is just public. It's not reasonable to be able to enforce any license, so it may as well just be considered public domain. But IANAL.
If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.
On the other hand, if someone takes photos I've shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they're definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.
Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren't based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.
It's almost like those websites that say "when you upload your content we can do what we want with it" did that for a good reason: to avoid all this complexity and possible lawsuit.
Unless the image is already copyrighted, it takes publishing to provide a claim of copyright. Is email publishing? What if it’s a listserv with 300 recipients?
In the 181 countries party to the Berne Convention, the image is copyrighted as soon as it is recorded to a physical medium. Yes, that includes a memory card, hard drive, etc....