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Dear Silicon Valley tech bros,
I hear you think you can do whatever you want with posts on the Internet if they’re publicly available so I have a challenge for you.
Here’s a link to The Guardian—all their posts are publicly accessible:
https://www.theguardian.com/europe
1. Create your own site and copy the posts there.
2. Let me know what happens.
Or are you saying there should be one rule for corporations and another for human beings where the former are protected but the latter are not?
@aral The Guardian's RSS feeds are indeed fetched and cached at the websites of most of the big RSS-reader apps aren't they?
@pre The Guardian’s content is either used within the terms of service The Guardian provides or the infracting parties receive a cease and desist. The point is that folks are far more likely to seek the consent of a corporate entity than a human one. (Although, given the huge disparity in power between corporations, even that hasn’t been true for a while when you look at what OpenAI/Microsoft, Google, etc., are doing.) One rule for them, one rule for us.
The bridges submit follow-requests which Mastodon users can accept by default, or vet by user.
I guess we want some sort of "Accept Misskey and Masto users by default, but require consent for Hubzilla and At-Protocl bridges since they aren't activitypub-exclusive" option?
Hard to imagine how such a thing might work unless maybe Mastodon added finer-grained control than just "accept by default" or "vet every follow-request"
I believe you are misinterpreting copyright.
The guardian's "terms of service" only applies to accessing the website itself and in most cases says a bunch of things that are not legally valid.
As the pages on guardians website are publicly available, everyone who makes well-formed requests for x pages has permission to read everything that the server sends back.
As for the article text itself, a license is required to distribute such article text and doing so without a license would constitute copyright infringement.
In this case a cease a desist would be a legal threat to sue for copyright infringement if certain copying activities aren't ceased - the terms of service aren't applicable, although, threats against unwanted activities that don't actually infringe copyright may use claimed terms of service infringements as a crutch.
Copyright does apply to any creative fedi post as well, although the way they are posted at least authorities the copying activities required for federation.
Lol. I used (actually my wife a long time ago) to subscribe to the NYT. I had a RSS application that downloaded headers only.
The NYT blacklisted my IP address because I was "inappropriately scraping their data" and after i showed them I just subscribed to their RSS feeds.
The NYT blacklisted my IP address, because I used a few of *their* RSS feeds.
They certainly don't let you just wholesale steal their work.
@aral the Daily Fail are great ones for doing this, as they take people's videos and post them on their site, without consent.
@aral I wonder what the situation would be if I published all my toots under a CC-NC license, then if someone republished it on a commercial (ad funded) platform would that be a breach of license and I could sue them?
@sammachin Technically, yes. Practically, it would be expensive and I don’t know if there is any precedent. Mind you, that’s how precedent is set :)
(Mine are under CC BY-NC-SA.)
@aral I wonder in the bridg
ing case who's the one breaching the license, the operator of the bridge or the operator of the other site thats publishing my content 
freezr 
@freezr @sammachin I’d be surprised if CC took any action that wasn’t in the interests of Silicon Valley.
@aral
How do you feel about bots that mirror Hellsite accounts to fediverse? I'm generally against those, cos like obviously the person could be on fediverse if they wanted, and they're not, so what are we doing? They would seem to be doing what you are describing here? Should there be more pushback against 
etc mirror bots on fedi?
@prettyhuman I mean folks are free to make them and we’re free not to follow them. I guess the onus is on the hellsite folks to make a fuss about that.
@aral
My guestion is I guess that is there a difference in
1) someone making a bot that pulls posts from Twitter/X/whatever it's called and publishes them on fediverse
Vs.
2) someone making a thing that pulls posts from fediverse and publishes them on Bluesky or whoever plans on using the Bridge tech?
Same? Different? I'm genuinely interested in how these compare in other peoples opinions. To me it just seems people don't mind the twitterbots here as much as they mind the bridge thing.