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1. Embed this notice
   carbon offsets are BS ☕️🥬 (plasma4045@mas.to)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 10:55:36 JST carbon offsets are BS ☕️🥬

   • Tim Chambers
   • Jon

   @jdp23 @tchambers

   Huh. It sounds like it may be possible to federate and still hosts could legally deny them permission to scrape.

   I’m no lawyer though. That’s just how I read that first link.

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chambers (tchambers@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 10:55:35 JST Tim Chambers

     in reply to

     • Jon

     @plasma4045 @jdp23 it is gigantically unclear if federated public content is "owned" by anyone. Unlike the centrlized commercial apps, who do claim ownership of all posts on them. So legal protections are shall we say untested. I don't own the posts done by users on indieweb.social for example.

     Plus anything public over the web is scrapable. End of story, fetchable or not via ActivityPub. That leaves the 1 percent of DM's or non-public messages, but 99 percent is out there.

   • Embed this notice
     Jon (jdp23@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 11:11:13 JST Jon

     in reply to

     • Tim Chambers

     @tchambers as the linked article says, companies *don't* base their claims on ownership; in fact, they "expressly disclaim any property rights in that data in their terms of use."

     But, I agree that scraping hasn't been tested for anything federated. And in a situation like indieweb.social where the instance admin is publicly saying he doesn't think there any legal barriers to scraping data, courts might well find that companies can rely on that.

     @plasma4045

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chambers (tchambers@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 11:23:00 JST Tim Chambers

     in reply to

     • Jon

     @jdp23 @plasma4045 Sorry to be clearer:

     As I read your article it said I might in theory, be able to claim that I had a contract TOS on my server about my server not being scrapable. For the sake of my argument, lets assume that worked.

     But I was talking about "federated public data" that began on my server but isn't primarily on my server anymore. It is on the public Fediverse syndicated out.

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chambers (tchambers@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 11:23:13 JST Tim Chambers

     in reply to

     • Jon

     @jdp23 @plasma4045

     At this point - since I don't own those posts - it is scrapable off of any public server on the Fedi that has those posts on them - and that does allows scraping. My TOS does not apply there. And since I have no claims of ownership, that isn't my content to say about the public posts as they migrate out.

   • Embed this notice
     Jon (jdp23@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 11:28:26 JST Jon

     in reply to

     • Tim Chambers

     @tchambers Ah, I misunderstood, I see what you're saying. I agree that hasn't been litigated yet. But also, there's a straightforward answer: only federate with instances whose TOS also prohibits scraping (and who only federate with no-scraping instances).

     @plasma4045

   • Embed this notice
     Tim Chambers (tchambers@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 14:43:28 JST Tim Chambers

     in reply to

     • Jon

     @jdp23 @plasma4045
     I was not as clear as I could have been. But thanks… Assuming the TOS thing legally worked (iffy at best legally I think ) …to your idea of only federating to servers w/ some anti-scrapping TOS, how would that work? It would seem: Any set of anti-scraping servers would be federating in the real world with sets of servers who could - by omission or commission - federate to just *one* server that did not have or enforce said TOS….Then all federated content is in the clear.

   • Embed this notice
     Jon (jdp23@indieweb.social)'s status on Monday, 18-Dec-2023 15:16:08 JST Jon

     in reply to

     • Tim Chambers

     @tchambers OK, "straightforward" might have been a bit of an exaggeration. One approach would be to extend nodeinfo with this information, or to check the ToS and privacy policy as part of federation requests, and reject ones that don't fit the bill.

     But even without ToS changes, since as we agree the legal situation is murky, given how much regulatory pressure Meta's under, there's significant legal risk for them to scrape fediverse sites -- and the gain is relatively small.

     @plasma4045