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> So short of attaching licenses to every post you make

I think you have this backwards. Full copyright protection is the default for all content not licensed otherwise. Publishing does not put content into a "public domain" status. Social media platforms already have strong legal terms around every piece of content. If you violate that license, platforms may choose to fuck you up. E.g.: https://www.malwarebytes.com/blog/news/2023/01/untraceable-s...

It would be easy enough for particular Mastodon servers and/or accounts to be explicit about their downstream licensing.

I understand that generally you retain the copyright to your works implicitly and that you don't have to actively file for copyright in order to gain the protection of copyright law.

I'm arguing that it's pretty preposterous for a global decentralized federated social platform to assume some authority (enforced by whom, that'd require a central group of enforcers) over the licensing of posts on the network by invoking US copyright law. Conceptually it doesn't make any sense. So the only thing Mastodon can do is at a protocol/code level require that public content flowing through the pipes be licensed for public consumption (copying and distribution) on the network, the colloquial "public domain".

> It would be easy enough

I can't really imagine the matrix of which nodes can federate with which others based on the default content license they impose on posted content. "Oh you can only view my post if you use this server over here because it uses a compatible downstream licensing configuration." Would that really "work"?

Its important to remember that the tech must conform to the law, not the other way around. If it's not compatible, the the tech that must bend.

That said, why is it strange to think that a license agreement must happen before a node can reshare a post?

How can the node copy the bytes to display the post to users and to send it to other nodes, if obeying US copyright to a T, if the node does not either have copyrights over the content or the content is sufficiently licensed in a way that allows the node those privileges?

> I'm arguing that it's pretty preposterous for a global decentralized federated social platform to assume some authority (enforced by whom, that'd require a central group of enforcers) over the licensing

Why is that not-an-entity the only thing you're considering as able to enforce copyright or otherwise check a platform for doing something legally dubious?

> the colloquial "public domain".

That is not what public domain means.

Would you like to elaborate instead of just a snarky "that's not how that works" with no real contribution to the discussion?

1. Who would enforce copyright on a globally distributed content platform? Which country's "copyright" laws does a node follow? Who is responsible (who do you sue) when Meta federates with a node and receives a copy of content it allegedly isn't licensed to have or doesn't have copyrights over? (Hint: not Meta, they didn't make the copy.)

2. Why do you think I used "colloquial"? On a platform where people are free to publicly view, share, copy, remix, etc. the content then the content is said to be in the public domain. In the US specifically (post 1988) the terms of use of the platform would probably need to explicitly have you release your copyrights on the content before you post, to make it clear that the content is to be treated that way. But I'm saying, the spirit of a public social network where everyone is free to engage with the text of other people's posts, is that the content is "in the public domain". Unless you can provide an alternative context and definition of "public domain" where you're technically correct...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_domain

> That is not what public domain means.

FWIW, I've had a discussion with a British lawyer, IIRC British law has no specific term for what is named "public domain" in US copyright law, and the term "public domain" in UK law means "the public can access it".

Mastodon-the-software doesn't have to do anything. Mastodon instances have to choose whether to block Threads or not.

Of course there is no 'central enforcement', that would be at odds with the very principle of federated social media (namely, that instance admins are free to choose how they run their own instance).

This gets you right back to the issue of having to transmit licenses with all content. Which is fine - this can absolutely be a thing which exists within the protocol.

But then people are suddenly going to find they don't get the impact they want either: because the immediate outcome is simply going to be "license for public distribution or we'll reject your content" because everything else is too much hassle.

Blocking Threads doesn't prevent your content from getting to Meta. Some other instance that you federate with might not block it. See: TFA.

Blocking Threads is necessary but not sufficient. I should probably be clearer about that in the article.

>Not even legally you don't… Copyright cannot restrict who can view a work you created once you transfer or license that work to somebody else (e.g. by releasing it publicly on the fediverse).

This is literally the opposite of what you are saying now. Saying you legally have no right to restrict then trying to act like you were saying that, in some sort of practical sense, it would not be possible to enforce a legal restriction.

I can see how my wording was confusing. Sorry. Just focus on this:

> So short of attaching licenses to every post you make, no, there's not a socially healthy, let alone even viable, strategy to control content distribution in the "fediverse".

I'm arguing that copyright in and of itself does not grant you the right to control how owned copies of your work are used. This is evident by the first sale doctrine.

You can choose to only distribute your work with an attached license that does not confer ownership rights. And because of the license I've agreed to I can't do anything with that work that would breach the license agreement. And because you didn't transfer ownership to me of an actual copy of the work, the first sale doctrine does not apply. And I'm not allowed to copy that work, because of copyright. The limits you've imposed on the work are because of the license not because of copyright.

There's no component of copyright that statutorily grants an author any control of the transitive flow of copyrighted content. It's all in the license.

I can't believe people who are into decentralization and federation now essentially want to reinvent DRM!

DRM could be cool if, rather than cryptographically preventing copying, it would encode complicated licensing agreements especially if it effectively, when transmitting, rewrites the license for the recipient.

This could be guaranteed by laws rather than tech. Laws don't do much to protect big companies from the little people. That's why DRM is currently about technical solutions. But laws can have a huge impact on protecting little people from big companies. That's why big companies lobby!

I don't doubt that such 'license encoding DRM' as I envision will be abused by media publishers by linking it to cryptographic protection. But the underlying idea is pretty nice.

This is a very thoughtful take! I agree that an encoding of intent for enforcement by law rather than code would be a useful solution.

But let's come up with a different name for that than DRM :)

Why not? These are separate concepts.

It's a good question, so let me try to explain why this is dissonant to me, if I can.

I think maybe the easiest way to illustrate it is through the person of Cory Doctorow. I don't know for sure because I haven't been following him for awhile, but I suspect he is a fan of the fediverse concept. He and the kinds of people that he influenced (like me) strike me as the kind of people for whom open federated social networks are appealing and satisfying as a solution in contrast to closed centralized corporate social networks.

But then, a big part of my time following him and just generally being in that milieu, one of the primary boogeymen for us was the DRM being pushed by corporate interests.

So to me, DRM seems anathema to this entire aesthetic of federation.

Licensing != DRM though ... ?

You can have a very strict license without actually using any cryptographic 'protection' on the content.

See, for example, the way IBM used to in the 00s (still does?) release software. There was no copy protection, no license servers, no keys. But copyright was absolutely retained and you couldn't legally just give it to anyone.

If you were found to be running their stuff without the appropriate commercial license then their sales department will be along very shortly to work out a nice cost-effective plan for you, and failing that the lawyers will be involved.

Closed, licensed, but it's not DRM.

You could also look at the FOSS world. Licenses are actually important because if you license some software under GPL, you have legal grounds to sue if a corporation then uses that software in violation of the license. Most corporations just treat GPL as anathema because it's rarely worth the legal effort.

So far we haven't thought of social media content as licensed but it effectively is: the license is usually the EULA of the host giving them the ability to do whatever they want with it.

So really to be responsible with social media content we really should both get a license from our users and then provide a compatible license to federating peers. At that point they can decide not to accept the license, thereby refusing to federate that content. There are already filters like this for filtering certain kinds of content from peers, so it doesn't seem like it should be a huge reach.

Creative Commons might be sufficient here. If you license content as non-commercial, then would Facebook be barred from choosing to display it to the users of their commercial platform?

It's important to note that Stallman considers the GPL a hack on the copyright system (a clever one, sure, but a hack nonetheless). He'd rather it not have to exist, because we shouldn't need to exist in a world where companies can own the recipe to mix bytes around and achieve a certain software flavor.

I mean you can't copyright a food recipe. It so obviously would be stupid to have designer meals and chefs who are the only person that can cook a certain dish. The argument is that software isn't any different. And you can't copyright the fastest route from point A to B on a map. So why can you e.g. copyright the preferred method of sending bytes down an HDMI cable?

I'm sympathetic to that perspective, but that would entail pushing an ideal upstream to where change isn't going to happen because there's far too much financial interest in copyrighting arrangements of bytes. So if the system's unfixable, then hacking it seems like the right approach.

Besides which, ignoring GPL, Creative Commons seems like a good license because creative works are more than logical arrangements of bytes (there are only so many useful ways of sending bytes down an HDMI cable, but many more ways to write a novel) and is probably the more appropriate license for social media content (at least assuming the author wants to apply that license to their content).

Yeah fair. My reading was that the intention is a technical solution to lock down public data. I do think a legal solution makes more sense.

This is the classic problem of assuming that people who share a few opinions with you share all your other opinions as well.

Yes, totally. But that is common because it is useful for understanding how aggregates of people behave. It's an estimation heuristic. It's bad to get caught thinking estimates are truly reality, but it's not bad to try to estimate things.

I do think there is a throughline between the ... techno-hippies? of my youth for whom DRM was a big concern, and those of today, for whom corporate concentration of social media is a big concern. But I know that's just a heuristic. Nevertheless, I think it's interesting to me that there is now some subset of the newer group who is arguing for something that seems very analogous to DRM for social media content.

I think you're probably right that it's totally different people, not the same people being inconsistent.

Because people who create decentralized networks usually also subscribe to the concept of free flowing information, hence the decentralized network.

One is their issues with a centralized service is control. Their issue with copyrighted material is control.

Of course not everyone holds the same beliefs

Hey well put! Your answer is both more succinct and better than mine :)

I'm such a negative person I can't tell if you are being sarcastic

Ha, sorry about that, not sarcastic at all.

Thanks for putting it succinctly.

> If you want to place downstream restrictions on your content then you have to license it (and get someone to agree to your license)

That's not how copyright works like... at all. HN needs a license to display your comment right now (see here: https://www.ycombinator.com/legal/#tou). Copyright works by default (in the US) of being the most restricted. The first sale doctrine applies but online when you distribute something you're not making 1 copy.

I understand how copyright works. I'm arguing it's silly to try and apply it to a public forum in the way it's implemented. And all the centralized social platforms agree as you've pointed out because they require users to forfeit their copyright to posts made on their platform, or at least force them to licenses the content for redistribution on/within their network.

Like, by quoting me on HN you're actually violating the content license and terms of use agreement (you're only allowed to use your "user content" not mine). You'd argue fair use, and you'd probably win. But nevertheless you'd have to argue it.

I think we're in the weeds with copyright. What's the problem we're trying to solve? A federated public communication protocol/system. What do centralized platforms do in the face of copyright? Require users essentially forfeit their copyright over the content they post (if they're nice limited to the scope of the content traversing their network). Why? Because it doesn't work any other way. What is the expectation I have when reading a public post? I expect I am allowed to read it, quote it, remix it, etc. because it's been posted publicly. Nobody asks permission to quote each other even though they technically should in accordance with US copyright law. How would a discussion transpire without a shared understanding of how the content is allowed to be used on any network?

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And I mean if you really want to get into the weeds, copyright prevents you from e.g. playing a digital music file on your computer since the bytes need to be copied over the network, into memory, onto output devices, etc. This was the original observation: copyright basically prevents you from doing anything digital with any digital media. That's why everyone needs a license and we're in license hell. In digital it's copying all the way down so hit it with the copyright hammer.

Imagine if we applied our digital understanding of copyright to traditional artwork. I have a painting. You visit. By shining light on the painting I'm reproducing the image on your retinas. You say copyright violation? I say preposterous! What if I take a picture of the painting that I own and show you? Uh oh.

Copyright just doesn't make sense when applied to a public social network. At all. And it doesn't make any sense because a social network isn't about artists trying to make money off their works, it's about anons trying to win internet points for the day.

> I have a painting. You visit. By shining light on the painting I'm reproducing the image on your retinas. You say copyright violation? I say preposterous! What if I take a picture of the painting that I own and show you? Uh oh.

Those are all fair use. The definition of fair use is intentionally somewhat vague, leaving a lot of room for courts to exercise discretion, but showing an artwork to a guest and taking a photo of a copyrighted work for noncommercial purposes are clearly protected by precedent.

Two of the key factors a court will look at in deciding whether a use is fair is the use's purpose and character and what effect (if any) the use will have on the market for the used work[0]. Threads is an ad-supported, commercial endeavor, so I don't foresee them winning on a fair use argument when they republish a post from another site in order to sell ads next to it. If you have your own mastodon instance and you sell a single ad on it, then Threads would, by republishing your post, be depriving you of revenue for your creative work in order to increase the value of their own ad real estate via exhibition of your copyrighted content.

[0]: https://www.justia.com/intellectual-property/copyright/photo...

I feel like you're being needlessly obtuse when the other person is being objectively correct.

I'm not disagreeing with them. I'm just a little confused why people are bringing up that you don't need to explicitly attach a notice to content you create to retain the copyright (since 1988 in the US). Of course that's objectively correct. I never argued otherwise. And to add, I pointed out that by the letter of the law, quoting my post on HN is a violation because I never granted you a license to do that (you'd have to argue fair use before a court if I sued you). I'm not disagreeing I'm just continuing the discussion.

My argument is that it's not implicitly fair use for a social network to copy user content to which they don't have the copyright and distribute it across a network. And that that's crazy because a (distributed nontheless) social network doesn't work if there isn't a shared understanding that when users post publicly that they're granting the public a license to copy, re-share, remix, etc. their content. Which is de facto releasing it to the public domain.

> but you can sell the original copy, show it to whomever you want, etc

The license associated with physical media does have restrictions. You can't mount a public display of the work without acquiring a separate license. E.g., you can't buy a DVD of a movie and then screen it for a group (outside of what's permitted under fair use). If you sell tickets to that screening or intersperse ads, thereby infringing copyright for commercial gain, you're in even hotter water.

There's no license attached to physical media, it's all statutory.

> Saying "only on Tuesdays and not in Brazil" gives too much control to creators to dictate how their art should be interpreted.

Do you feel the same way about restrictive open source software licenses like GPL3?

Yes all software should just be public domain. But because we have icky copyright, we have to have icky software licenses.

While your view here is perfectly valid, it would have resulted in a -very- different world than the one we have today.

There would basically be no software industry. There couldn't be because there would be no way to economically do it.

Software would thus only be made by hardware manufacturers- and would need specialised hardware for every task.

For evidence of this alternate reality I point to an era when thus was the case. In the 60s and 70s there were a number of hardware companies who all wrote the software for their specific machines. You paid for yhe hardware, not the software.

This model flowed into the fame consoles of the 70s (atari, intelivision and so on.) PCs started either this model, although software-only plays start appearing. They make money selling games, visicalc etc. Microsoft famously licenses Dos to IBM but non-exclusivly. Suddenly hardware is a commodity and clones appear.

All the big companies today are software companies. The cloud is proprietary software running on commodity hardware. The ability to grow, to make big bets, to develop is predicated on the existence of copyright.

But wait, Linux right? That surely negates my argument. Leaving aside the distinction that it's copyrighted, not public domain, Linux is a clone of a commercial system. That inspiration came from somewhere. It exists because Linus had a general-purpose computer, which arguably only existed because of copyrighted software.

Aside all that, original Linux was pretty primitive. It grew in part on revenues supplied by other software companies. While it would be fun to imagine a world with only Linux, it's harder to imagine how that world is funded.

SQLite is in the public domain. Its an example of what can be done. It's an amazing fantastic bit of software. For all that it's built on the proprietary work of others (SQL). And it's far less capable than proprietary database engines of the 90s (oracle, informix et al.)

So while I understand your viewpoint, it's also earth noting that copyright built the world we are in now, and the alternative would look very, very, different.

If you don't believe in isolated software patents, then a world where you have to actually make a hardware system to patent your invention as hardware with supporting software doesn't seem so bad. At this point the iPhone patent would be just about to expire and we'd all be able to legally clone, sell, remix, improve, etc. the system Apple spent the last 14 years profiting off of, royalty free, nonetheless.

I'm not so sure the world today where we don't own our iPhones because Apple retains an exclusive license to the software deployed on the hardware is really a good thing for the world. And I'm 100% sure society would have figured out how to make the iPhone in a world where all software was public domain, regardless.

As an example, we see more and more open source SASS companies as time progresses. This directly validates the model that you can profit off of a well run service provider business on top of software which you allow any user to copy for free.

Apple’s patents aren’t the issue. The world can’t just figure out how to manufacturer hardware scale. The market is littered with failed hardware startups and even companies like Sony and Microsoft can’t figure out how to manufacturer the number of consoles in three years to match the number of phones Apple sells in less than a quarter.

Literally dozens of Android manufacturers can’t figure out how to compete with Apple at scale. Android is already open source

If you could run iOS on other hardware, you'd get an iPhone for $300. That would be competitive.

Why do you think running iOS on cheap commodity hardware would be any better than Android?

Apple designs it’s hardware and software in concert.

I have no idea, but at least we'd be able to try it out and see. Plus the iMessage blue bubble thing would be dead and that's a big part of Apple's social platform lock in today.