Scuttlebutt and copyright

I've been thinking lots about copyright over the past few years, mostly in the context of software and its source code, but I've just realized that I don't understand how Scuttlebutt (the social system) handles copyright. Can someone point me in the right direction?

I've been operating under an implicit [magical] copyright license what gives our peers the right to re-broadcast our feed, but I don't remember actually giving consent for that. Is this the case, or are we just trusting our friends not to sue us for copyright infringement? I remember some discussion between @andré and @elavoie a while ago but I don't remember think there was a conclusion.

Would it be wise to avoid replicating content we don't have an explicit copyright for? Or has this problem already been solved through some hand-wavey legal magic?

#copyright #copyleft #ssb

Assuming we do have to explicitly grant copyright in the future, maybe this would be an interesting exercise in copyleft? I'm imagining a recursive copyright license where:

• you can reproduce my content in whole or in part
• n = 3
• if n > 0
  • you can grant them the same license, except n = n - 1

This might be highly unreasonable (or even produce unwanted results) but it was the first thing that jumped into my mind.

are we just trusting our friends not to sue us for copyright infringement?

Umm, I think some of the pubs mirror ssb pages into web pages, so any public post here is potentially public, internet-wide, and findable by web-crawlers, and thus, by any litigation-happy content, umm, owners. (Capitalism is funny.)

Anyway, there's a related issue with what happens if a friend of a friend posts child-porn or nuclear weapons designs or state secrets and it ends up on your laptop and airport security finds it... Just sayin.

@Linas

Umm, I think some of the pubs mirror ssb pages into web pages

Yeah, I started thinking about it in this context, but realized that even opting into publicWebHosting might not prevent someone from suing you.

cc: @daan, maybe relevant to hosting a public viewer

I'm afraid it is, although I don't think it's specific to my publicWebHosting troubles. IIRC the defense "I can't take it back from others who I may have distributed it to" has never fared particularly well. Usually the counter is "oh well then we'll bill you for every (real or imagined) damage that that has caused.

@Christian Bundy oh, actually this may be way more relevant on second thought. If we make a token/expiry system and only use that, i.e. if no content is visible without a token, and never for a long time, that should dramatically reduce the attack surface through copyright trolls trawling everything on the web.

@daan

I was more-so coming at this from the angle of we haven't actually given each other consent to re-share messages and that that is where the ambiguous consent comes in. Copyright trolls could use this to sue us for distributing their data without a license, but getting informed and explicit consent would make this way simpler in general.

Right now I'm down to have my messages shared far and wide on any medium, but it sounds like other folks are against having their messages available over public HTTP. Other friends are fine with public HTTP and really want to avoid being indexed by a search engine. It seems like long-term lots of people are interested in a system where we only replicate your content within n hops of people you follow, that way SSB content can't be spidered at all.

I guess my point is that all of these desires are in the same problem-space of how we share our data with our friends and what we want them to do with that, and while "do whatever you want with my data" is simple I doubt it's actually the position taken by most butts. I think that we should probably codify the default value and give people options for how they can express their requests.

@Christian Bundy, AFAIK, if there is no contract, then copyright belongs to the author. So formally everybody is infringing copyright here even if they do not distribute movies or music.

As for solution, if X wants to free their followers from responsibility, X needs to attach a license to their posts. Adding a field with a license name is technically efficient, but I do not know whether it would have legal weight.

There are already beautiful and renowned licences like Creative Commons and GFDL. I see people explicitly publishing their blogs under free licenses, so, IMHO, these licenses will definitely have their proponents. If somebody wants to protect their posts from spreading by some complex copyright schemes, they need to muster their own resources for that protection. Copyright protection is not free. I suspect that few people will actually do this.