Ask Lemmy

Creator owns the copyright.

I don't think it really does or can do anything.

I think it makes people feel good, like they're fighting against AI or something.

In my opinion, it just clutters up comments.

IANAL. However I know a bit.

which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”).

Yes, this is how it works. You give them a license to your posts.

I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this necessary, or is the creator the automatic copyright owner?

The creator automatically owns the copyright. People can put in license terms, but they're effectively useless in this context. Let's say OpenAI violates the copyright on your post (it's still an open question whether or not training AI on copyrighted data constitutes copyright infringement, but we'll assume it does). Your only recourse is to sue them if they do this. Because you never registered the copyright, you're limited to recovering actual damages -- if you do register the copyright you can get statutory damages, which are up to $150k per violation. So how much money did you lose on the ability to commercially exploit this post that OpenAI took away from you by copying your posts? Less than the cost to bring the suit, I'm sure.

So the TL;DR here is that the anti-AI licensing thing is only effective if you're registering the copyright on your posts/comments. And even then, that's only true if AI training is considered to be copyright infringement.

On top of all comments generally being copyrighted by their author automatically, the licence at the bottom of a comment is like a no trespassing sign. The sign itself doesn't stop people from trespassing. You still need to call police when someone trespasses. If you never call police then the sign is literally useless.

The licence is the same thing. If someone includes it at the bottom of all their comments, but never launches legal action when someone violates that licence agreement, then it's literally useless. Given that launching legal action is incredibly expensive, I highly doubt the people using these licences will ever follow up. Also, how will they even know? How will they know a company used their comment as training data for their commercial AI? How are they going to even enforce the terms of the licence?

does adding the copyright/license information do anything?

Not a lawyer, but I'd be sore amazed if "your honor, he copy/pasted my Lemmy comment" flies in court, regardless of your copyright status. The same goes for those AI use notices--they're a nice feel-good statement, but the scrapers won't care, and good luck (a) proving they scraped your comment, (b) proving they made money on it, and (c) getting a single red dime for your troubles.

Well, if my voice here means anything, there's a systemic answer to that which is associated with me that one might say I simply carry over.

I don't think it exists at all on the fediverse. I've talked about it before, not a lawyer, but from a technical standpoint I don't know how anyone can claim copyright.

All fediverse apps start on your instance, you write a post. Great, maybe there's a disclaimer there. But then it's shotgunned out to literally anyone or anything that's listening. Other instances, governments, corporate, whatever. You're literally giving it to anyone who would listen.

So to me copyright is like saying "only people I approve of can look at this sign" and then posting that sign on every tree and post in town

In the vast majority of countries, everything written down is automatically copyrighted by default and if you want to release it into the public domain or under a free license you have to make it explicit.