Aral Balkan
@boyter I hear you. And the next person/company to do it won’t be as thoughtful as you.
Perhaps we have to start thinking about adding licenses to posts and other potential controls that give people more control over if/when/how their posts are aggregated or syndicated.
Aral Balkan
@jonpainterphoto What Jon said. Just because I post the contents of my book publicly, it doesn’t mean that you can then go and republish it unless you have a license to do so. So that’s just the copyright angle. And then there’s the social one. Sure, if you can technically do something, you can do it. But you can also get socially outcast from a community for acting like a dick when you do so anyway when people ask you not to.
Jon
@ArisuGunpla @aral @boyter Oh, what a person creates or publishes on social media is definitely owned by them, unless the service requires them to surrender their IP rights. An author’s copyright to a work begins at the creation of the work.
That’s why instances based in the US need to affirmatively create a DMCA contact to avoid liability for copyright infringement should one of their users violate someone’s copyright.
ArisuGunpla
@aral @boyter
Are you serious @aral ? You are using social media. On the internet. Nothing you say here is private or even owned by you. As soon as you serve your content to a location outside your server, it's out. You cannot unpost. Are you going to rail against the wayback machine too? What if I retoot your post without your permission? What if I take a screenshot right now and meme you on Reddit??? If you don't want to spread something, don't post it!
Aral Balkan
@tiago Fair use is an interesting one in this context: so if someone scrapes web sites for content and places them on their own site, then yes, you can very much argue copyright infringement (see for example AP v. Meltwater in the US, which wasn’t even for full content of articles).
If they also create accounts using your name and post the content there, you might have other recourse too (although any legal action is complicated by jurisdiction)…
Tiago Peixoto
@jonpainterphoto @ArisuGunpla @aral @boyter This argument is quite misleading if you omit the important concept of fair use.
If it were necessary to get explicit permission to copy social media posts, then no social media platform would be possible.
This is true also for the web in general: if someone visits your website, you can't claim copyright infringement if its contents are downloaded.
The DCMA provision is there for content that the poster does not have the copyright in the first place — and therefore fair use does not apply.
If a site aggregates public social media posts, while preserving attribution, this clearly falls within the fair use scope.
Aral Balkan
@tiago … but yes, none of this applies if you’re a trillion-dollar Silicon Valley company like Google. Then, you can take whatever you want and do whatever you want with it and, at worst, you’ll settle many years down the line if someone manages to find the means to hold you at least somewhat accountable.
Aral Balkan
@tiago … But thank you all for this timely reminder that I have to consider not just private vs public data for the #SmallWeb (the former is a solved problem using public-key cryptography) but, as much as possible, how to empower people to exert as much control as possible over the content they make publicly available also. Some of this can be incentivised at a technical level via rate limits, etc. But also by enabling easy licensing defaults, etc.
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