Comment on Mastodon updates terms of service to ban AI model training on user data

• drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  No it doesn’t because all mastodon data is public and does not require ToS agreement to be collected.

  Mastodon could only argue damages but that would be impossible to litigate in any extent due to decentralized and free nature of Mastodon and Fediverse.

  This is a good thing. Mastodon shouldn’t control anything related to the legality of data flowing in the fediverse - that’s the entire point.

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  • umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The way copyright law works, by default you don’t have any right to make use of anything, even if it’s posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.

    Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn’t mean it’s legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      No that’s not how copyright works. Copyright prohibits distribution not copying.

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      • umbraroze@slrpnk.net ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you’re allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.

        My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you’re allowed to use it and for what purpose.

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      • maxwellfire@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

        I don’t think this is true. While copying might fall under fair use if used for some purpose, you definitely can get in trouble for copying even without distributing those copies.

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  • ideonek@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    I think that the point is that instances can choose thier own rules. Article is about an instance. Not about the entire platform.

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  • Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    No it doesn’t because all mastodon data is public and does not require ToS agreement to be collected.

    ToS are legalese bullshit. They mean next to nothing since most stuff if it comes to court, gets annuled.

    ToS kind of does protect you, but holding tge service hostage or not (as in you can’t watch one little youtube video without selling your soul to Google) doesn’t make a big difference - rrasonable expectations are that users own their content (as is the case in youtube’s case - youtube doesn’t ponce on your videos afaik), although they do own rights to distributing it (obviously), and using sane technological measures to prevent what they don’t want. In youtube’s case that’s watching e.g. privated videos, and in another case it can be AI scrapers.

    Robots.txt is, just like a ToS, a contract. It just isn’t legalese as it isn’t meant to scare people, but be useful to programmers making the site and those using the scraper. They’re programmers, not marketers or lawyers, of course they won’t deal with legalese if they csn avoid it.

    Again, law is not leagese.

    A robots.txt file is a contract by use,like when you park in a charge zone - entering the zone, you accept the obigation to pay.

    When you scrape a site you first check for robots.txt in all the reasonable places it should be, look for its terms, and follow them… If you don’t want to riskgetting sued.

    Similarily, entering a store, you are expected to pay for what you take. There is no entry machine like on a metro where you, instead if swiping a card, read the store’s T&C’s, but know that it’s common sense security will come after you, if not the police. Yet you clicked no “I agree”? How come you don’t just take what you want?

    And robots.txt is a mature technology and easily a “standard”. Any competent lawyer will point that out to the jury and judge, who will most likely rule appropristely. The Internet is not the Wild West anymore.

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Listen man I’ve been working with web scraping for years though now I do the exact opposite (anti bot tech) and robots.txt is absolutely meaningless and there’s zero precedent in the US or elsewhere of it doing anything but providing web crawlers a map of your web site.

      I can tell you the thing we tell to all of our clients - the only way to sue bots is to sue for direct damages not for automation. This has always been true and will continue to be true for foreseeable future in the US because you its impossible to set a precedent here as there are just too many players involved that benefit from web automation.

      You can actually check out:

      • Meta v. Bright Data
      • hiq labs v. inkedIn

      These cases are very recent and huge in web automation community and went all the way to the Ninth Circuit and settled at Supreme Court in favor of bots.

      I’m telling you man copyright is so ruined that it’s really just a machine for feeding middle managers and lawyers. But hey it gives me a great job security and I can afford to work on actual free software which as you might know is invredibly hard to fund otherwise!

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  • the_abecedarian@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    That is not true. The terms of service cover "your access and use of Server Operator's ("Administrator", "we", or "us") instance". Access includes reading data from the server.

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    • drmoose@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      No, there are several types of legal agreements on the web in this particular case there’s:

      • click wrap where the visitor must explicitly agree with terms of service by clicking a button - that’s what you see when you register an account.
      • browse wrap where the visitor implicitly agrees with ToS by just browsing the web.

      The former is enforcable while the latter is almost impossible to enforce in free western countries because you just can agree with something just by browsing a public space.

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