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
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.