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Comment by sneak | Hacker News Reader

…so does this mean Meta is receiving my own copyrighted data from my server and storing it on their own servers for the benefit of their platform and apps?

Sounds like redistribution and perhaps public performance of copyrighted content without a license.

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This is a fundamental part of the fediverse, or at least mastodon, right? There can't be an federation without doing exactly this between mastodon instances.

I, and I'm sure others, are suspicious that F**book will train AI on it, will keep copies and apply their own licenses, et cetera, until someone calls them out on it (ie, sues them).

Me too. However you're free to join or move to an instance that doesn't federate with Threads.

That's fair but the comment I'm responding to seems to take offense at just storing and distributing it on threads, which is exactly what every single fediverse instance has to do. There are also tools for dealing with this, namely you can configure a mastodon instance to not federate with a server.

If someone is more concerned about training models on the data and whether that is legal or not, I assume Meta could easily be doing that already if they wanted to via scraping.

Not offense, just pointing it out. My own Mastodon instance is down at the moment; I need to fix it.

Posting on a server that federates doesn’t grant anyone a copyright license to the content you post, regardless of the fact that you can choose a server that doesn’t federate.

All AI companies are already training on any data they can get (by scraping or torrenting). At this point I don't think anyone will be stopping them, see [1] for the latest UK update.

[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/law/2025/jun/06/uk-government-si...

>F**book

Out of curiosity, why did you self-censor facebook? Does it keep the AI away, or something?

presumably they self-censored some derogatory alternative spelling, perhaps fuckbook?

Correct. That said, simply running an ActivityPub server does not grant you a copyright license to the content that is federated to you.

Also, most people don’t make money by running an instance of Mastodon. Meta is absolutely using the UGC displayed on their platform to make money.

> Sounds like redistribution and perhaps public performance of copyrighted content without a license.

Unless they take from a server with a more permissive license that had the right to distribute it...

Kind of hard to stop it since stuff being federated and re-distributed is kind of the point.

I guess you could refuse permission to corporations operating something like threads specifically.

I would be surprised if any server tried to withhold the rights of the data themselves. The point is to federate, and I can't imagine how you could say Meta can't federate but other companies can

I don't see why you couldn't have a usage agreement or terms of service that said exactly that.

By default, all rights are reserved. Operating a Mastodon instance doesn’t grant anyone - Meta or mastodon.social - rights to redistribute the copyrighted content you post that is then federated.

I could legitimately DMCA most of the fediverse right now if I wanted to.

Aren't the protocols used for federation and clients different, i.e. could it be argued when one allows the protocols to be used for federation then one implicitly allows others to also federate?

I wonder if one could also DMCA ISPs providing proxy services, IRC or NNTP on the same terms and be successful.

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