I continue to be squeezed by both sides of the threads situation. I am operating on the premise that people who think I’m a terrible person and this is a terrible instance for allowing any interaction with threads have left and/or blocked, those remaining seem to want to either have nothing to do with threads at all and are mainly concerned with their data, and those who want to seamlessly interact with threads. I have threads limited/silenced on Infosec.exchange, but that isn’t seamless, and it’s also not fully blocking. So, here’s my proposal: I remove the limit from threads, and run a job to domain block threads for each account. Any account who chooses can undo the block (or ask me to do it) and then they can seamlessly interact with threads, and those who want nothing to do with them get their way.
[…]
(Note: this was only intended for Infosec.exchange/.town, and fedia.social)
– @jerry@infosec.exchange
And Meta is laughing all the way to the bank.
Individual blocking means nothing, it just hides the accounts and politely asks the remote server to not allow any responses.
Only defederation really makes the server stop sharing data and only that has a decent chance to convince the Meta lawyers that maybe copyright prevents them from gobbling up everything and feed it to their advertisement algorithms and train their AIs on it.
they can already download what people are sharing. that’s not what this is about.
if they want to train AIs on your data they can scrap it from the regular feed without any integration. If they needed federation to do it they could just set up a mastodon instance to grab the data - but they don’t.
They can not legally just download and use what people share. Meta is under high legal scrutiny and this would be clearly against copyright.
If they can train AI on it is currently an open legal question, but for sure they can do it if you allow them to do it by federating openly with them.
if they run a mastodon instance, you’d be federating with them just as much.
are you sure these comments are somehow protected by copyright and they can’t use them? when I post publicly like this I have no expectation of control over use.I’d be very surprised if I could somehow sue a company using this comment to train AIs.
I’d also be surprised if that status changed somehow if the server was then connected to threads?
If they run a Mastodon instance they would be defederated as well.
And yes you retain copyright over what you write automatically and Meta can’t use it legally just like that. It doesn’t matter how you feel about it, the only thing that matters is what is written in the ToS of your instance which you agreed to when signing up. Usually it has a clause that allows them to forward messages to other federated instances, which would include Threads unless defederated.
Training AI is a big exception to all this as it is currently not known how to deal with all this legally, as training an AI does not require to copy the content but rather just have the training algorithm “look” at it…
It only takes looking at your data to figure out your trends, save the trend, and serve you ads.
Think about it: public posts are public. It’s the same as you putting a note in the town square. Anyone can look at it and see the username of who wrote it.
Defederation doesn’t stop that, it just inconveniences people who want to use/see both sides from one login.
This is not how it works technically.
For Meta to analyze your data they need to either scrape it (legally questionable and scraper bots are commonly blocked on server level) or work with a local copy. By federating with them you are allowing them to legally make a local copy of all the posts of the instance.
Newspaper articled are often also public, yet google got sued (and lost) because they were scraping and analyzing them to put previews in their search results.
Just because something is public doesn’t mean you can just take it. Copyright still aplies.
Defederation does stop legal use, and Meta is already in enough legal trouble, especially in the EU, that they are unlikely to blatantly pirate user contributed content from sites that defederated from them.
I can’t find anything like what you’re describing - my instance has a legal notice which is just a disclaimer saying they can’t be held liable, lemmy.world has a fair use and terms of service which are 404s and their privacy policy just says they won’t sell your data (but might use it for internal research) - can you tell me what you mean?
Well, if they don’t have a ToS clause for that, then technically they are violating your copyright by sharing your contributions with other instances.
Most commercial services force users to completely sign over the legal rights for their contributions to the service.
On the Lemmy instance I am on the ToS clearly states that people agree to have their original contributions licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0 or later license, which allows redistribution if certain terms are fulfilled.
Can’t they? The internet is full of scrapers and reposters, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a company like that going down. I’m not sure what the point would be (generate a dataset? perform sentiment analysis on certain topics? streamline their tag detection system with off-platform data?), but they can, as long as they follow the relevant privacy laws (“practically no restrictions” outside of the EEA+UK+California, “anonymise before processing” everywhere else).
They would only violate copyright if they redistribute the content. Downloading and processing the content offline wouldn’t really be breaking any laws, outside of a structured PII situation.
You are missing the point entirely: in order to put advertisement next to it, they of course need to copy and redistribute it.
Why do you think they haven’t enabled two way federation yet? It is precisely because of the unclear legal situation regarding content sourced through federation.
And as shady as Meta is, they are an established company with a big legal department and not some web scalper operating from a 3rd world country.
That just forces everyone who wants/needs the bigger ecosystem to leave Mastodon and join Threads. It’s daft.
The beauty of the Fediverse is that different instances can make different choices and people can choose their instance based on the choices they prefer. The Fediverse is not a monolith and demanding that it become one is just wildly missing the point.