this post was submitted on 14 Feb 2025
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Yeah but there is a FOSS nature about it. At least ANYONE can do whatever they want with the comments and posts I make public instead of just whichever company pays reddit for API access.
And reddit has some legal jargon about co-owning the copyright to whatever you post over there but lemmy doesn't so you technically have more protection here to your own intellectual property.
And privacy is a whole different can of worms as I don't think ruud is harvesting telemetry to sell to advertisers and whatnot.
I mean... True; it's just I wouldn't characterize Lemmy as superior on privacy. Ideally we'd figure out a way to fix that, but I'm not sure we can really.
This I'm not so sure about. You aren't handing over ownership rights when you sign up for most (any?) instance, but your ownership right is effectively null and void.
IANAL but arguably in a US court (at least) since Lemmy is effectively a true public place, you effectively lose the right to tell other people what they can do with your interactions.
That part is arguably true. It is harder to tie this data back to a particular user for the purposes of selling to advertisers.
You don't lose your copyright just for posting it in a public space, even Reddit. But you do give reddit a perpetual, non-revokable, transferrable license to do basically whatever they want with your IP :
Found here under "your content": https://redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement
With Lemmy all that language of perpetual, non-revokable, transferrable goes away to my knowledge. You still wholely own your own IP if you decide you don't want it on Lemmy anymore.
The law is largely down to who argues better in court. There is precedent for reduced rights in public spaces. e.g. if you go into the town square and talk to someone and it's caught on the camera of the mother a park bench away that's recording her child ... that's not an illegal recording and she has the copyright on said recording. You have no legal right to ask the mother to delete the recording or delete your audio from the recording, even in a two party consent space because you have no right to privacy in a public setting like that.
Similarly, when you post on Lemmy ... it's kind of good faith that if you delete something it actually gets deleted from the platform across all instances and that it's not just visibility deleted but deleted from the databases under the hood.
You do "own your content" but it's pretty meaningless ownership.
Written works are tangible and so have a copyright upon creation, just like the video in your example. That recording posted online "publicly" where anyone can see it free of charge wouldn't change its copyright. Also private internet sites really aren't "public" space in the ways most laws would define it, because it's a server hosted by a private individual. We're in ruud's house right now so-to-speak. He has every right to censor us and show us the door if he so chooses.
By posting or commenting here (or on reddit for that matter) we don't fully waive copyright to IP. If I write a unique poem here and some random person plagiarizes it and sells it I could still sue. But on reddit, if reddit decides to publish a book of "Best of reddit poems" or transfer that license to someone else I'm shit out of luck. On lemmy without the legalese I stand a good chance in court revoking the assumed license of my work and having a positive legal outcome.
I'm in my own house, notice the @social.packetlosss.gg; our "houses" are just talking and that continued conversation is subject to ruud's and I's discretion. The way federation works, really nobody "owns" the content, there's just an agreement on what the primary copy is. There's no support for this in the software currently, but you could conceptually change which server is the primary copy at any time. The protocol and to some extent the content on it exist in an intangible space.
IMO all Reddit did was strengthen their legal argument; they arguably already had the right to make a "book of reddit poems." They just wanted to stack the deck on their side. Arguably you have the right to make a book of poems on Reddit.
At least yall dont literally legally own my whole ass identity while im on lemmy