It should be pretty obvious that a decentralized network that many use specifically to not be connected to centralized networks houses mostly people who do not wish to have their posts bridged to B...
I don’t get the problem. It’s just syncing public information back and forth. I mean, the information is fully public for anyone to access. If you mind who accesses it, you shouldn’t make it public.
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available? There’s a reason that social media companies include clauses in their EULA that posting content gives them (and only them unless otherwise noted) the right to reproduce that content.
Take any media publicly uploaded by a major artist on X and repost it to YouTube unaltered. You should be able to defend any copyright strikes because of your “publicly available” argument, right?
Allowing public broadcast once doesn’t void the rights of the creator to control when and where that content gets broadcast again.
Again, false equivalence, and I don’t think you understood what @Crackhappy meant when they said it.
You are trying to equate the concept of whether you can do something with whether a civil lawsuit would rule that you are liable for damages for it.
Of course you can copy something someone uploaded to the internet. They made it publicly available, it’s trivial to copy. Disney or so might take you to court for it, and here we get to the crux of the matter: Assuming you were to post all your posts here under an “all rights reserved” license and the instance you’re doing that on confirm you in writing that they’ll comply with orders for data in case you need it for a lawsuit, you’d absolutely be able to go after someone creating a bridge copying your data to Threads in a civil lawsuit.
Are you going to do that over any comment you post here? Probably not, plus, honestly, good luck showing that you have been materially damaged by the copy.
But again, false equivalence. You can trivially copy anything on the web. Whether you are liable for it is a wholly different thing nobody was talking about.
Copyright has fair use provisions, and one could argue that a bridge that lets you public content on a different network is no different than providing a VCR-to-DVD service.
Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷
That’s is not the right analogy. No one is making the bridge and saying “I can take the content from person A on Lemmy and sell it on Bluesky”. they are just saying “Here is a copy of what Person A posted on Lemmy”.
In terms of copyright, why is it okay from someone on a different Mastodon server to relay content from a Lemmy server and even redistribute it (through, e.g, RSS readers), but it’s not okay for a bridge to redistribute it to a Bluesky server?
Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.
For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.
Lemmy’s federation model is that all posts and comments get replicated across all instances. If an instance goes down, the copied content still will live in my instance. It’s not just caching.
It does indeed outside of the united IP holders of america.
In the free world, you can record any tv or radio program that is freely available for your personal consumption.
Welcome to the actual land of the free.
Edit: answering another comment of yours. You can absolutely repost the twitter, reddit and whatnot post of anyone. It is paywalled stuff that you are not allowed to share.
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available?
The answer to that is yes, at least if you‘re not living in a corpo hellscape.
Assuming the comments pass the originality threshold, you’re actually not allowed to just copy someone else’s work and repost it. Copyright still applies to written work, and the EULA of most platforms only provide the service you’re posting to with the right to reproduction. By default, you’re not allowed to reproduce copyrighted works, which would be any piece of original (enough) writing.
Practically, though, no court is going to care. The law may be on the side of the copyright holder, but actually suing reposter will take a lot of money and the damages you can collect will be absolutely minimal.
Thanks for elaborating. The obvious flaw in this logic is that even the most original thing brings both the platform and the writer the visibility. Assuming you‘re knowledgeable and technically correct, this would always be unenforceable because it is the whole purpose of the platform to retweet, cite and repost.
I‘m not too knowledgeable in IP law or the local US court proceedings but where I live, your EULA/TOS become null and void if you put the customer at a disadvantage. Having this damocles sword dangling above their heads would most likely not hold in court (retweet = visibility but technically against TOS)
I agree that enforcing this will be basically impossible, but I can imagine someone with more money than sense going after reposts ending up successful because they may be in the right, legally speaking. In the same way torrenting has had companies calculate damages by multiplying a fine with the number of people the content was shared with, Fediverse servers may rack up quite a fine if such a lawsuit ever succeeds.
The lines about reproducing works in EULA/TOS don’t exist to provide any (dis)advantage to the user, they’re basically legally required for the software to operate. Otherwise, websites like Facebook wouldn’t be allowed to share the image you posted with anyone but you. I don’t think anyone will object to the right for Facebook to show your friends the pictures you’ve shared with them, so I don’t think they’ll be struck by not complying with the law, either. If anything, Fediverse servers need a line like that, with an addition that any servers federating with the user’s server may also reproduce the work.
As for a sword of Damocles in the Fediverse: any EU-based Fediverse server (and there are many!) hosted by a company or organisation is in a lot of trouble if any data protection agency ever bothers to look into them. I don’t know any Fediverse server that has the capabilities to be GDPR-compliant. For servers hosted as a hobby by individuals, I don’t think this is a problem (there are legal exemptions for personal stuff) but the copyright thing is only a minor risk compared to the data privacy issues.
Often, Fediverse enthusiasts choose to ignore the laws that make their dreams very hard to achieve, but I can imagine a Threads/Tumblr lawsuit having devastating effects for the Fediverse at large, and nobody seems to care. I know the law is complicated and boring and I’m no lawyer myself, but the wishful thinking that legal issues will never crop up that I often see in open source communities can be a real risk. I’m reminded of Napster blatantly ignoring copyright on the internet because they wanted to bring new and exciting tech to the world; great aspirations, but how long will they last?
On the one hand, the ability to share is implied in the platform and the publication settings of the software you’re using.
On the other hand, copyright still applies. You need to pass a minimum threshold of originality (which can be quite hard for Tweet-length content) but creative works in any form are copyrighted, and are subject to intellectual property laws.
Now, I don’t think any lawyer will recommend you to sue someone reposting your social media posts. However, the ideals of the Fediverse are in direct conflict with laws and regulations around the world, from intellectual property laws to privacy laws.
If you post a coptrightable original work, you decide who’s allowed to reproduce that work. You don’t have the legal right to repost stuff you found online, no matter how common that may be on social media; you’re not allowed to reproduce a work unless you provide permission.
This is why Facebook and Twitter have those “you give us the unrevocable right to reproduce your works” lines in their terms of service. The Fediverse lacks such terms, because it’s not one single server. Like with many other problems, the Fediverse overlooks and ignores the real legal conundrums by pretending it doesn’t exist.
In my opinion, the standard controls on services like Mastodon should be sufficient: you decide whether you share a post with a server, with the tagged people, or with everyone. The default, the latter option, should be expected to include bridges and all other kinds of online services. However, I can’t think of a legal basis for this.
The best I can think of is the fact ActivityPub is a push-based protocol, so your server is the one uploading content to the bridge. However, this type of technical implementation detail isn’t accepted as a legal defence in other cases (imagine hacking becoming legal for any request/response protocol!).
You only have the option if it’s your instance that you’re having defederated. You cannot prevent anyone from:
Spinning up a new instance then federating with you, then bridging the content from there to the defederated instance.
Simply using a web-scraper and a bot to post your stuff on another instance.
The second part is basically what is happening here.
Importantly, I feel people misunderstand on a fundamental level what it means to post things openly on the internet. Your only way to prevent this is simply to not post to a site that people can access freely and without a process through which you are vetting them for whether you trust them. As in: Just like IRL when you decide whether to tell things to friends or acquaintences or well, not.
But, on the web, you not only cannot prevent someone taking your public data and copying it over to wherever they so desire, you don’t even know since they could be posting it in a place that you in turn have no access to so you cannot see it there.
Copying data through a protocol that purports to be integrated with the network frames that copying as a part of that network. If it was acquired through a bridge that does not respect federation then it is dishonestly coopting the legitimacy of the fediverse. Screenshots or copy-pastes won’t have the same appearance of integration and will be intuitively understood by the reader as being lifted from another context. This happens all the time and we’re very familiar with it. If copying data were all this was about, this solution should be sufficient.
It brings fediverse users into direct contact with non-federated networks in a way that they have not consented to. The ability to post directly back & forth exposes people to the kinds of discussions that we had previously moderated out of our networks. Defederation is an important tool for limiting the access bad actors have to our discussions, and accepting a situation where we can no longer defederate neuters that tool.
This isn’t just about “information wants to be free”. This is about keeping the door closed to the bigots, and forcing them to come onto our territory if they want to talk to us, so we can kick them out the moment they show their asses.
You can’t defederate from the bridge because it’s not going to be the only instance of the bridge. Anyone will be able to host an instance of the bridge server, just like anyone can host an instance of any fedi software. Sure, you can block brid.gy, but then you also have to block every other instance, too. On the mastodon instance I use, there are 45 blocked instances of Birdsite Live, a (now defunct, one way) Twitter bridge!
Opting out with a hashtag technically works, but there is a character limit in the mastodon bio. It also depends on all bridges agreeing to the same hashtag.
Opt-in just makes a lot more sense, imo. It avoids different instances hosting duplicate mirrors and it avoids anyone (on bsky or fedi!) from having their posts scraped and mirrored to a different network without their knowledge.
Instance can block bridge domain and it will not be federated
I was referring to the
Put the text #nobridge in your profile bio, refresh your profile on your user page, and Bridgy Fed will stop bridging your account. Or feel free to send me a request privately.
I don’t get the problem. It’s just syncing public information back and forth. I mean, the information is fully public for anyone to access. If you mind who accesses it, you shouldn’t make it public.
Does that mean every TV show broadcast over the air, every song on the radio, and every book in a public library is now “free” to pirate on the Internet because they were made publicly available? There’s a reason that social media companies include clauses in their EULA that posting content gives them (and only them unless otherwise noted) the right to reproduce that content.
False equivalence.
Okay, well try this one:
Take any media publicly uploaded by a major artist on X and repost it to YouTube unaltered. You should be able to defend any copyright strikes because of your “publicly available” argument, right?
Allowing public broadcast once doesn’t void the rights of the creator to control when and where that content gets broadcast again.
Again, false equivalence, and I don’t think you understood what @Crackhappy meant when they said it.
You are trying to equate the concept of whether you can do something with whether a civil lawsuit would rule that you are liable for damages for it.
Of course you can copy something someone uploaded to the internet. They made it publicly available, it’s trivial to copy. Disney or so might take you to court for it, and here we get to the crux of the matter: Assuming you were to post all your posts here under an “all rights reserved” license and the instance you’re doing that on confirm you in writing that they’ll comply with orders for data in case you need it for a lawsuit, you’d absolutely be able to go after someone creating a bridge copying your data to Threads in a civil lawsuit.
Are you going to do that over any comment you post here? Probably not, plus, honestly, good luck showing that you have been materially damaged by the copy.
But again, false equivalence. You can trivially copy anything on the web. Whether you are liable for it is a wholly different thing nobody was talking about.
Copyright has fair use provisions, and one could argue that a bridge that lets you public content on a different network is no different than providing a VCR-to-DVD service.
Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷
That’s is not the right analogy. No one is making the bridge and saying “I can take the content from person A on Lemmy and sell it on Bluesky”. they are just saying “Here is a copy of what Person A posted on Lemmy”.
In terms of copyright, why is it okay from someone on a different Mastodon server to relay content from a Lemmy server and even redistribute it (through, e.g, RSS readers), but it’s not okay for a bridge to redistribute it to a Bluesky server?
Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.
For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.
Lemmy’s federation model is that all posts and comments get replicated across all instances. If an instance goes down, the copied content still will live in my instance. It’s not just caching.
Yes.
It does indeed outside of the united IP holders of america.
In the free world, you can record any tv or radio program that is freely available for your personal consumption.
Welcome to the actual land of the free.
Edit: answering another comment of yours. You can absolutely repost the twitter, reddit and whatnot post of anyone. It is paywalled stuff that you are not allowed to share.
How is reposting content to another social media platform with over a million users “personal consumption”?
Thats not what I said. I was answering to this:
The answer to that is yes, at least if you‘re not living in a corpo hellscape.
Assuming the comments pass the originality threshold, you’re actually not allowed to just copy someone else’s work and repost it. Copyright still applies to written work, and the EULA of most platforms only provide the service you’re posting to with the right to reproduction. By default, you’re not allowed to reproduce copyrighted works, which would be any piece of original (enough) writing.
Practically, though, no court is going to care. The law may be on the side of the copyright holder, but actually suing reposter will take a lot of money and the damages you can collect will be absolutely minimal.
Thanks for elaborating. The obvious flaw in this logic is that even the most original thing brings both the platform and the writer the visibility. Assuming you‘re knowledgeable and technically correct, this would always be unenforceable because it is the whole purpose of the platform to retweet, cite and repost.
I‘m not too knowledgeable in IP law or the local US court proceedings but where I live, your EULA/TOS become null and void if you put the customer at a disadvantage. Having this damocles sword dangling above their heads would most likely not hold in court (retweet = visibility but technically against TOS)
I agree that enforcing this will be basically impossible, but I can imagine someone with more money than sense going after reposts ending up successful because they may be in the right, legally speaking. In the same way torrenting has had companies calculate damages by multiplying a fine with the number of people the content was shared with, Fediverse servers may rack up quite a fine if such a lawsuit ever succeeds.
The lines about reproducing works in EULA/TOS don’t exist to provide any (dis)advantage to the user, they’re basically legally required for the software to operate. Otherwise, websites like Facebook wouldn’t be allowed to share the image you posted with anyone but you. I don’t think anyone will object to the right for Facebook to show your friends the pictures you’ve shared with them, so I don’t think they’ll be struck by not complying with the law, either. If anything, Fediverse servers need a line like that, with an addition that any servers federating with the user’s server may also reproduce the work.
As for a sword of Damocles in the Fediverse: any EU-based Fediverse server (and there are many!) hosted by a company or organisation is in a lot of trouble if any data protection agency ever bothers to look into them. I don’t know any Fediverse server that has the capabilities to be GDPR-compliant. For servers hosted as a hobby by individuals, I don’t think this is a problem (there are legal exemptions for personal stuff) but the copyright thing is only a minor risk compared to the data privacy issues.
Often, Fediverse enthusiasts choose to ignore the laws that make their dreams very hard to achieve, but I can imagine a Threads/Tumblr lawsuit having devastating effects for the Fediverse at large, and nobody seems to care. I know the law is complicated and boring and I’m no lawyer myself, but the wishful thinking that legal issues will never crop up that I often see in open source communities can be a real risk. I’m reminded of Napster blatantly ignoring copyright on the internet because they wanted to bring new and exciting tech to the world; great aspirations, but how long will they last?
On the one hand, the ability to share is implied in the platform and the publication settings of the software you’re using.
On the other hand, copyright still applies. You need to pass a minimum threshold of originality (which can be quite hard for Tweet-length content) but creative works in any form are copyrighted, and are subject to intellectual property laws.
Now, I don’t think any lawyer will recommend you to sue someone reposting your social media posts. However, the ideals of the Fediverse are in direct conflict with laws and regulations around the world, from intellectual property laws to privacy laws.
If you post a coptrightable original work, you decide who’s allowed to reproduce that work. You don’t have the legal right to repost stuff you found online, no matter how common that may be on social media; you’re not allowed to reproduce a work unless you provide permission.
This is why Facebook and Twitter have those “you give us the unrevocable right to reproduce your works” lines in their terms of service. The Fediverse lacks such terms, because it’s not one single server. Like with many other problems, the Fediverse overlooks and ignores the real legal conundrums by pretending it doesn’t exist.
In my opinion, the standard controls on services like Mastodon should be sufficient: you decide whether you share a post with a server, with the tagged people, or with everyone. The default, the latter option, should be expected to include bridges and all other kinds of online services. However, I can’t think of a legal basis for this.
The best I can think of is the fact ActivityPub is a push-based protocol, so your server is the one uploading content to the bridge. However, this type of technical implementation detail isn’t accepted as a legal defence in other cases (imagine hacking becoming legal for any request/response protocol!).
In ActivityPub, you have the freedom to defederate.
This bridge doesn’t allow you to do so, I can understand why people have issues with it.
So/so.
You only have the option if it’s your instance that you’re having defederated. You cannot prevent anyone from:
The second part is basically what is happening here.
Importantly, I feel people misunderstand on a fundamental level what it means to post things openly on the internet. Your only way to prevent this is simply to not post to a site that people can access freely and without a process through which you are vetting them for whether you trust them. As in: Just like IRL when you decide whether to tell things to friends or acquaintences or well, not.
But, on the web, you not only cannot prevent someone taking your public data and copying it over to wherever they so desire, you don’t even know since they could be posting it in a place that you in turn have no access to so you cannot see it there.
There are differences:
Copying data through a protocol that purports to be integrated with the network frames that copying as a part of that network. If it was acquired through a bridge that does not respect federation then it is dishonestly coopting the legitimacy of the fediverse. Screenshots or copy-pastes won’t have the same appearance of integration and will be intuitively understood by the reader as being lifted from another context. This happens all the time and we’re very familiar with it. If copying data were all this was about, this solution should be sufficient.
It brings fediverse users into direct contact with non-federated networks in a way that they have not consented to. The ability to post directly back & forth exposes people to the kinds of discussions that we had previously moderated out of our networks. Defederation is an important tool for limiting the access bad actors have to our discussions, and accepting a situation where we can no longer defederate neuters that tool.
This isn’t just about “information wants to be free”. This is about keeping the door closed to the bigots, and forcing them to come onto our territory if they want to talk to us, so we can kick them out the moment they show their asses.
Defederate from the bridge, then?
Unless it’s parsing the HTML of your frontend, but you can probably block the user agent in that case.
@Blaze What do you mean by “doesn’t allow you to do so”? Instance can block bridge domain and it will not be federated
How is it different from the rest of instances?
@Carighan
You can’t defederate from the bridge because it’s not going to be the only instance of the bridge. Anyone will be able to host an instance of the bridge server, just like anyone can host an instance of any fedi software. Sure, you can block
brid.gy, but then you also have to block every other instance, too. On the mastodon instance I use, there are 45 blocked instances of Birdsite Live, a (now defunct, one way) Twitter bridge!Opting out with a hashtag technically works, but there is a character limit in the mastodon bio. It also depends on all bridges agreeing to the same hashtag.
Opt-in just makes a lot more sense, imo. It avoids different instances hosting duplicate mirrors and it avoids anyone (on bsky or fedi!) from having their posts scraped and mirrored to a different network without their knowledge.
I was referring to the
https://fed.brid.gy/docs#opt-out
Seems like defederation is not enough in this case, as it’s not mentioned as a way to opt-out.