I know what the Creative Commons is but not this new thing or why it keeps popping up in comments on Lemmy

  • Skull giver@popplesburger.hilciferous.nl
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    5 months ago

    They add a license to the content. By default, content (that passes a certain creativity criterion) is protected under copyright. For instance, a beautiful poem you write on Lemmy is copyrighted automatically. Legally speaking, this content may not be reproduced by anyone you did not explicitly produce a license for. That includes everything created creatively. Paintings, memes, songs, poems, Tiktok videos. Reposting content that passes the basic creativity requirements is almost always a copyright violation.

    As you may have noticed by being on the internet, nobody ever sues any other company for this copyright violation. The DMCA exists to solve this problem: websites aren’t responsible for the violating content their users post, as long as they take down content when they receive a credible DMCA report, and take reasonable action. This is why you can post a screencap from your favourite movie onto Reddit without Reddit getting sued for the copyright violation (note that “free use” isn’t a right, but a legal defence, which only applies from the moment the lawsuit already started, and isn’t as broad as Youtubers and influencers think it does).

    It’d be silly to sue for every stupid meme repost. In practice, most of the internet ignores most of copyright law, because legal enforcement would cost way more than winning lawsuits will ever do.

    With the way the current AI lawsuits are going, these licenses are completely meaningless for preventing AI from copying message contents. It looks like the creators suing AI companies are made to prove that for specific images and content generated by AI are directly derived from their works, their works being embedded in the data set does not seem to be taken as a valid argument.

    If a full copy of the Matrix and porn videos are allowed to be embedded by AI, these silly little links aren’t going to make any difference. At worst, the licenses may taint the generated output if they’re used at large scale, but easily removed by any serious AI company.

    There is something positive about these licenses, though; for some companies and people, you get the freedom to use these posts, repost them, share them, edit them, you name it; something legally not permitted by default, as long as you stick to the minor obligations spelled out in the license.

    So technically, these links do more than the stupid “I DO NOT CONSENT TO FACEBOOK’S DATA COLLECTION” posts. They do nothing against AI, but they do give you, the reader, more freedoms than you normally have.