Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this necessary, or is the creator the automatic copyright owner? Does adding the copyright/license information do anything?
Please note if you have legal credentials in your reply. (I’m in the USA, but I’d be interested to hear about other jurisdictions if there are differences)
I don’t think it really does or can do anything.
I think it makes people feel good, like they’re fighting against AI or something.
In my opinion, it just clutters up comments.
It’s crazy to me that anyone thinks it does anything. How can someone who cares enough about AI not know the controversies about OpenAI’s training data?
The people and organizations building LLMs do not give a fuck if you add that garbage to your comment or not.
Also, good luck to those people if they have to prove an AI was trained with their comment
Does that mean creative commons doesn’t really mean anything? I have my website cc by sa, thinking or changing it to cc by sa no cc but I feel like companies would still take my stuff from my website.
Depends on what your goal is. Strictly speaking cc by sa is more permissive than putting no copyright notice at all, since copyright is automatic, and the cc licenses grant various permissions not contained in standard copyright. It’s just a fancy legalistic way of saying “please credit me if you use this, continue to share in a similar fashion, but not for any commercial purpose”.
So if you want people to share your work, cc by sa makes sense.
Not sure but at the very least it’s way less annoying to see it on a website than it is under every comment
You (in certain cases your employer) own the copyright to your creations. It’s your intellectual property. By adding a license, you give others permission to use your property. That’s just good old capitalism.
Your property rights aren’t without limit, though. What exactly those are depends on jurisdiction, but you probably can’t stop others from archiving your site for their own purposes.
Yeah, it’s unclear whether copyright is even relevant when it comes to training AI. It feels a lot like people who feel very strongly about intellectual property but have clearly confused trademarks, patents, copyright, and maybe even regular old property law - they’ve got an idea of what they think is “right” and “wrong” but it’s not closely attached to any actual legal theory.
those anti ai training links remind me of the “i don’t consent to facebook using my data” posts my grandma makes
In the vast majority of countries, everything written down is automatically copyrighted by default and if you want to release it into the public domain or under a free license you have to make it explicit.
I’m writing this response mainly for the purpose of bringing it to the public domain. Feel free to screenshot, copy, and distribute however you see fit.
This comment is copyrighted and you are now committing piracy by reading it.
Pay the fee on your way out. Thank you.
Bold of you to assume I wasn’t already committing piracy before reading it.
It’s not really fully determined whether you can actually release something to the public domain, since the “public domain” is not a legally sanctioned entity. It’s just the name we use for things that are uncopyrightable or otherwise not copyrighted (like certain government works, or works old enough that the copyrights have expired). The CC0 license from Creative Commons gets around this by waiving all copyrights instead.
This waiver nullifies and voids all copyright on a work. It also provides a fallback all-permissive license in case the waiver is deemed legally invalid. In the worst case that even the license is deemed invalid, the license contains a promise from the copyright holder not to exercise any copyrights he/she owns in the work.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Granting_work_into_the_public_domain
does adding the copyright/license information do anything?
Not a lawyer, but I’d be sore amazed if “your honor, he copy/pasted my Lemmy comment” flies in court, regardless of your copyright status. The same goes for those AI use notices–they’re a nice feel-good statement, but the scrapers won’t care, and good luck (a) proving they scraped your comment, (b) proving they made money on it, and © getting a single red dime for your troubles.
You’re better off just pasting this guy into every comment to poison the well.
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🎩🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕
🌕🌕🌖🌑👁🌑👁🌓🌕
🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑👄🌑🌔🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🎀🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌔🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌔🍆🌑🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌖🌒🌕🌗🌒🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌗🌓🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌘🌔🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
🌕👠🌕🌕🌕👠🌕🌕🌕
We’ll all do it and then the AI will learn and do it too, but it’ll be too late for us to stop, having become a custom ingrained in the population.
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌕🎩🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕
🌕🌕🌖🌑👁🌑👁🌓🌕
🌕🌕🌗🌑🌑👄🌑🌔🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🎀🌑🌒🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌓🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌑🌑🌑🌔🌕🌕
🌕🌕🌘🌔🍆🌑🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌖🌒🌕🌗🌒🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌗🌓🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
🌕🌘🌔🌕🌗🌓🌕🌕🌕
🌕👠🌕🌕🌕👠🌕🌕🌕
On top of all comments generally being copyrighted by their author automatically, the licence at the bottom of a comment is like a no trespassing sign. The sign itself doesn’t stop people from trespassing. You still need to call police when someone trespasses. If you never call police then the sign is literally useless.
The licence is the same thing. If someone includes it at the bottom of all their comments, but never launches legal action when someone violates that licence agreement, then it’s literally useless. Given that launching legal action is incredibly expensive, I highly doubt the people using these licences will ever follow up. Also, how will they even know? How will they know a company used their comment as training data for their commercial AI? How are they going to even enforce the terms of the licence?
This is a really good point. If someone did violate your copyright, you have to enforce it. Almost no one is going to do that, so it’s effectively not copyrighted.
There’s a lot of “you couldn’t have been murdered because that’s illegal” thinking that somehow putting up a license on your posts stops these AI companies from scraping.
If someone includes it at the bottom of all their comments, but never launches legal action when someone violates that licence agreement, then it’s literally useless.
Well, its ‘poisoning the well’. What happens next depends.
For AI companies that actually honor licensing, or are fearful of getting caught at some point, they’ll honor/follow the license for the content.
And for those who do not, if they get caught with their hands in the cookie jar, Creative Commons (and other license creators) will have something to say about it. And they will get caught, we all know about black-box programming their models from the outside via our comments.
Finally, Congress right this second is considering new laws about this, so you never know. Companies in the future may be forced to have to explicitly state where the content comes from that they train their AI models on.
As far as wasting my time, all I do is copy/paste this one line of text via a macro keypress …
[~Anti~ ~Commercial-AI~ ~license~ ~(CC~ ~BY-NC-SA~ ~4.0)~](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/legalcode.en)
Its a momentary thing, so no effort at all.
The creator is the automatic copyright owner, or in some cases their employer. Copyright is automatic through international treaties like the Berne convention. The Berne convention is from the 19th century and was created by the authoritarian european empires of the time. The US joined only in 1989. I think your question shows that the idea has not fully taken hold of the public consciousness. Automatic copyright is now the global norm. (I always wonder how much its better copyright laws helped the US copyright industry to become globally dominant.)
Very short and/or simple texts are not copyrighted. IE they are public domain.
Adding a license statement gives others the right to use these posts accordingly. It only serves to give away rights but is not necessary to retain them. The real tricky question is the status of the other posts. I’d guess most jurisdictions have something like the concept of an implied license. Given how fanatical some lemmy users are on intellectual property, not having it in writing is really asking for trouble, though.
What such a license means for AI training is hard to say at this point. The right-wing tradition of EU copyright law gives owners much power. They can use a machine-readable opt-out. Whether such a notice qualifies is questionable. However, there is no standard for such a machine-readable opt-out, so who knows?
US copyright has a more left-wing tradition and is constitutionally limited to certain purposes. It’s unlikely that such a notice has any effect.
