I am once again encouraging #Fediverse#admins to add a clause to prohibit using their server’s data for machine training into their Terms of Use, because at some point in the near future there is likely going to be a lawsuit against some major company for scraping and exploiting users’ data, and we should make sure we have a legal leg to stand on.
@drahardja Do you have drop-in text for this? I tried to just make something up and realized that it would also disallow federation, which is obviously not what I want.
@drahardja@seb It’s clear, large corporations don’t care about what’s legally permissible in whatever jurisdictions they’re operating. I don’t understand the activity, pub API, but it would seem more effective to cripple the ability to mass scrape by throttling access in an appropriate fashion that wouldn’t impact typical usage patterns of users. I trust big corporations to not scrape data if they can’t scrape data.
If you can't enforce it it's not worth the effort.
What would be worth the effort is a treaty between as many governments as possible that enforced disclosing the sources of data for the purposes of machine learning and allowed individual and group rights for the exclusion of data whether before or after being used.
Along with that, a requirement for all models to provide an EXPLAIN function that delivered both the sources used and the inferences made.
@drahardja@seb Hi Dave! This is something the admin team is already working on, along with some other policy updates.
I'll push this to the top of the queue.
We have a lawyer on the team (that's me), so no need to collect money for the updates; I do SFBA work on a pro bono basis.
@neuralgraffiti@drahardja Decades ago, I — obviously — decided not to pursue a law degree, but since then every time I hear about pro bono work I question that decision. 😀
@neuralgraffiti@drahardja I don’t wish I were a lawyer in general, but it would be cool if there were the equivalent of pro bono work for a software engineer with my specialties (and NDAs).
@neuralgraffiti@drahardja@seb Possibly dumb/RTFM question, but how is content that’s been posted to sfba.social licensed downstream? And if there isn’t a default, might I suggest CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0, with the ability for individual users to choose their own license if they wish?
@pmonks@drahardja@seb Not a dumb question at all. We don't apply a particular license to the content right now, which means it's copyright to the poster (the legal default).
@neuralgraffiti@drahardja@seb@timbray While a protocol enhancement for this is definitely valuable, is it legally necessary? Wouldn’t a notice on the server’s “about” page (or similar) legally serve the same purpose (albeit without any machine discoverability)?
@neuralgraffiti@drahardja@seb@timbray Right, but isn’t a server default necessary anyway, for the (vast majority) of users who don’t bother explicitly licensing their own content?
And isn’t a protocol enhancement also nice but unnecessary for the per-user case? For example I explicitly license my content via a simple textual statement in my profile (though again, not easily machine discoverable, unlike a protocol enhancement).
@pmonks@drahardja@seb@timbray Yes to the per-user case. You could put a license in your profile or something and license your posts however you want.
As for the need for a default, there already is a server-wide default as far as copyright licensing goes. Any post eligible for copyright in the first place is automatically protected as soon as it posted.* So applying, e.g., a Creative Commons license by default would essentially take some rights away from our users by making their posts available for non-commercial use by others or whatever other permissions the license grants. (1/2)
@pmonks@drahardja@seb@timbray Circling back to the initial reason for this thread, where things get a more complicated is the interaction between contract law and copyright. In broad strokes, you can apply contract law to protect things that aren’t necessarily covered by copyright. The arguable reason to put something in our Terms of Service is that some pro-ML folks argue that using data for training a model is a fair use. If they are right, then it’s not a copyright violation to use the data, regardless if what license you’ve granted to the public. But it could be a violation of a provision in a ToS, giving you a breach of contract claim against someone improperly using the data.
This is putting aside some other complications, like implied licenses and such, but this is already a long post for my phone…
The legal standard is that it is protected when it is “fixed in a tangible medium.”
(2/2)
@drahardja@seb it won't do any good. Best case scenario they scrape it and use it, get sued and ten years later we all get to apply for 5 dollars as part of a class action settlement.
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