this post was submitted on 17 Feb 2024
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Legally, in EU, you probably cannot scrape an instance of someone else because of the database copyright law. But I have no idea if that applies to being part of the network. Since the other instances send you their content willingly.
Maybe someone should make a license extension to ActivityPub, where instances can communicate what can and what can't be done with the information they publish. Then at least there would be legal clarity. If it can be enforced is another question.
The thing is, the license probably doesn't mean a whole lot in that case because of the way content is shared on the Fediverse.
As you say, you actively send your content to other websites, and licenses need at least some degree of active acceptance. Including a license field in the metadata almost certainly does not meet any kind of legal threshold. It's significantly weaker than the EULAs they everyone knows that nobody reads.
I would think that subscribing to a community could be coupled to a license. Servers do not randomly send data, they only send it to other servers that are subscribed. And a server could technically decline a subscription.
But anyways, by default, copyright is with the creator. No idea what that looks like in legislations around the world, but if I remember correctly, in EU, just because you give a copy of a e.g. song you wrote to someone, does not actually mean they can do with it what they want. By default, you have all the rights, and the someone else needs to grant them to you. So if you give that someone also a contract where it states that he can play it in front of an audience, then they can, otherwise they cannot.
However, I am not sure how much implied consent can play a role here. By posting something on a fediverse instance, since the purpose of the fediverse is to share these posts with other servers, then by posting you may implicitly agree to this data being shared, and the next server can share it with another server again, and so on. This is the basic "boost" functionality of mastodon.
I believe though that because the purpose of the fediverse is not explicitly to train AI models or to sell the posts to someone else, it may be illegal to scrape all posts off to feed e.g. an AI model. But may also not be. We will never know until someone starts doing it and someone else sues them.
The thing is, servers don't subscribe to anything, users do. If the end user is provided with a license, the server is not obligated to honour it, because the server didn't agree to shit.
The content posted here has no obvious license. I wonder if an administrator could just put any license of his choice on your posts.
people joined basically with no terms of service on a lot of Lemmy instances.