Isn't the answer just the same if you consider it as email? I mean ActivityPub is basically just email but with "social media" features. Surely lawyers already have answers to the question when it comes to email.

If I send an email to the whole world, what is anyone allowed to do with it?

In some ways, I feel like ActivityPub is just public. It's not reasonable to be able to enforce any license, so it may as well just be considered public domain. But IANAL.

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 13 points 8 months ago (2 children)

If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright. If we apply the same thinking to ActivityPub, then most implementations of it are illegal. Fortunately, judges usually have enough common sense to step in and say a reasonable server admin would reasonably believe they have permission to do the things the popular software actually does.

On the other hand, if someone takes photos I've shared on Mastodon and sells prints of them or licenses them to a stock photo agency, they're definitely violating my copyright, and I will sue them. Some of the other options like running ads on a server are a little more ambiguous.

Some of the other expectations people seem to have aren't based on law but still-evolving concepts of consent. It would be nice to be able to program systems that have some awareness of what people are OK with.

[–] surewhynotlem@lemmy.world 10 points 8 months ago (1 children)

It's almost like those websites that say "when you upload your content we can do what we want with it" did that for a good reason: to avoid all this complexity and possible lawsuit.

[–] lambalicious@lemmy.sdf.org 1 points 8 months ago

And went too overboard with it, which is what tends to cause the usual responses to such changes in TOS. A better, more specific wording would have costed only $0.4/hour to pay to for their lawyer. Heck, I can do it almost for free:

When you upload your content you give us a limited, revocable, non-transferable license to distribute the content with its current license on your behalf.

[–] homesweethomeMrL@lemmy.world -1 points 8 months ago (1 children)

If you send me an image by email and I display it on a website without permission, I am violating your copyright.

Unless the image is already copyrighted, it takes publishing to provide a claim of copyright. Is email publishing? What if it’s a listserv with 300 recipients?

[–] Zak@lemmy.world 6 points 8 months ago

In the 181 countries party to the Berne Convention, the image is copyrighted as soon as it is recorded to a physical medium. Yes, that includes a memory card, hard drive, etc....