How are Lemmy.world posts and comments licensed?

zipsglacier@lemmy.world to Lemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.world – 98 points –

Stackoverflow, and the rest of the SE network, explicitly says that all user-generated content is licensed under CC-BY-SA. (link here). So, while SE has the right to do whatever they want with user content, they have to attribute the users who made it, and they have to keep the same or similar open license on the content. I know users can't really fight a big company on equal footing, but an explicit license like that is an implicit commitment to respecting, at least to some degree, users' ownership of their content.

On the other hand, Reddit's user agreement includes this: "...you irrevocably waive any claims and assertions of moral rights or attribution with respect to Your Content...." So, reddit asserts the right to use user content however it likes, with no rights to the users who generate it.

Recent events make me much more interested in knowing how the content I generate will be licensed. I know a cc license on Reddit content wouldn't change most of what makes the recent decisions so terrible, but it would give some standing to the people upset with how reddit plans to use what they've contributed.

I looked a bit, but didn't see an explicit statement about how the content in this server (lemmy.world) is licensed. (That's not a criticism; I think the admins have been busy with a few other things, and I really appreciate it!! I'm asking about this because I'm hoping to see more and more here.)

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The terms-of-use on every lemmy server I've seen would be considered underdeveloped by any lawyer I've ever met. Pragmatically:

  • In the absence of a TOU that requires licensing content to participate, content posted directly to a lemmy server would probably get whatever the default treatment is either in the jurisdiction where the post was made or where the server is hosted (or maybe even that depends on the jurisdiction of each in complex ways). In the US that would mean all content is all-rights-reserved by default.
  • But the poster/commenter isn't going to try to enforce their rights against lemmy. If they didn't want the content there, they wouldn't have put it there. And if they changed their mind they can delete it. And if they refuse to delete it themselves but contact an admin/mod... probably the admin/mod will just delete it for them.
  • If the jurisdiction where the instance is hosted has a safe-harbor framework of some kind (like the US does), that would provide some protection from copyright claims on user-generated content provided the admins followed the requirements to be eligible (which I think most admins do even if they don't know it).
  • Images and media hosted elsewhere but hotlinked from Lemmy may have their own TOU's (like imgur or whatever).

Overall, I'd say most of the lemmyverse has underbaked policy frameworks. The de-facto results function ok pragmatically anyway for what lemmy does on its own. Any scraping/reuse of content from Lemmy would have to navigate a very complex, confusing, and ambiguous licensing landscape. Probably 10y from now, if the Lemmyverse continues to grow, TOU's will be more common and more clear about open-licensing content or leaving it all-rights-reserved but giving lemmy a perpetual irrevocable non-exclusive right to distribute whatever you post here (the latter of which is more or less what's implicitly happening today).

Yeah, this matches my impression. Hopefully it won't take 10 years! I was sort of thinking that an explicit statement of open license would encourage some people that it's worth putting their content here.

... explicit statement of open license would encourage some people that it’s worth putting their content here.

I suspect you'll find this is a double-edged sword. Open-licensing frameworks quite deliberately set out requirements for re-use, and are agnostic about who can do so. Many lemmings have strong feelings about who good actors and bad actors are, irrespective of whether they meet policy requirements. It's all fun and games until nazilemmy starts their own fediverse and seeds it with all our comments and posts as allowed by the open-license.

Personally, I'm a believer in policies that enable both usage you agree with and usage you disagree with on equal terms, but that's not a selling point to everyone in the lemmyverse. All rights reserved with a carve-out for lemmy to distribute offers less wiggle room for abuse (and use). I'm not real opinionated about terms, but I do agree more clarity would be useful.

That's a good point, but I think it's also another motivation to have some explicit statement of licensing: people who prefer a different license will know they should move to a different home instance.

Considering the duplication of content across instances and how other instances can interact with any particular magazine's content, it might make the most sense for every magazine to have its own content license in it's sidebar and posting/commenting to that magazine is enforced under the magazine's license