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)
This Stack Exchange answer has some potentially relevant info. One notable excerpt:
The short answer is ‘it depends’. […]
It depends on:
- whether the code is eligible for copyright,
- what license the content of the particular forum is under, and
- what additional license (if any) the individual contributor has put it under.
Well first thing is that the license is a copyleft license so it is still allowed to be used, distributed, etc. the only real difference between this license and public domain (as far as I know) is me saying that I don’t want it being used for commercial purposes that’s it.
Also for me its more just a way for me to say fuck you to everything having to be commercialized so even if it doesn’t hold legal water I don’t care.
There’s a bit more to it than just that
BY - attribution is required
NC - as you said, cannot be used for commercial purposes
SA - Share Alike -anything using it must be shared under a similar license.
Ah well then I might try and find a license that doesn’t require attribution because I don’t care about that part. But the rest seem exactly what I’m going for.
Edit: grammar
Ah well then I might try and find a license that doesn’t require attribution because I don’t care about that part.
I would argue attribution is also really important, as it forces them to expose publicly how they’re training their models, bringing awareness.
Right but if they use your content anyway and you find out (and that’s a big if, because it’ll just disappear into some AI data set and you’ll never see it again), what are you going to do? Sue?
what are you going to do? Sue?
Personally? I let Creative Commons know what’s going on, that their licenses are being ignored.
I’m pretty sure they’d have something to say about the matter.
I don’t know.
But minimum royalty laws should exist.
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.
Creator owns the copyright.