Still figuring things out here. In the world, I mean.
I guess my example is that, isn’t it? 😅 My point is that you generally don’t have to remind people of your rights in order to enjoy them, and that’s true for copyright. Pick your own favorite right and replace my car analogy with it.
Now, I just need to find a way to compare cross-posting Reddit content without permission to the Nazis and describe Lemmy as “the Uber of ,” and I’ll have achieved the triple crown of cliche analogies. 😆
Cars are frequently stolen when parked outside. Private ownership of cars is ignored if not openly mocked by car thieves. If you park your own car outside, you should assume it will be stolen. So make sure to always post a sign on your car whenever you park it outside reading “This car is mine. Please do not steal it,” if you don’t want it to be stolen, or better yet, don’t park it outside at all.
It’s a bad take. It’s not how ownership works. You have copyright protection by nature of the fact that you created a piece of content. You’re not required to remind people of that fact in order to be protected, even if random internet person asserts that you should in their social media post.
That’s not the only reason it’s bad though. The idea that “I don’t like the way Reddit is treating their users, so to get back at Reddit… I’m going to violate the rights of the very same users I claim have been wronged by copying their content and posting it somewhere without their consent” is just baffling to me. You’re banking on the fact that random internet user probably won’t sue you… and you’re probably right! By taking advantage of that situation, you’re not “pwning Reddit.” You’re taking advantage of the person who created it in the first place. Ironically, if Reddit had further abused the situation by not just creating the honeypot where people would create free content for them but also by claiming ownership of that content, you’d have a cease and desist in a matter of days once your bot went live and we wouldn’t have to see this same question posted 2-3x a week on Lemmy.
I’m no intellectual property crusader. It’s messed up that corporations can consolidate intellectual property to the extent they have and extend copyrights for generations. It’s wild that we grant trademarks on vague ideas and then allow trolls to build businesses that do nothing but hold them and use them as weapons against people trying to actually make things. But if anyone should have the benefit of copyright protection, it’s the lowly internet user who posts content for free on social media for your entertainment.
Sure! Here’s one more thing I wish you would consider before you go forward with it: if you didn’t get sued for doing this, it wouldn’t be because you didn’t break the law. It would be because the people whose rights you violated can’t afford to sue (or maybe it’s just that they don’t have teams of lawyers scouring the internet to make sure all their rights are protected and haven’t noticed as a result). If Reddit claimed ownership over all content posted on the platform, it would be no less illegal, but you’d get a cease-and-desist in a heartbeat, followed by a lawsuit if you didn’t comply. Trying it only because the people whose rights you’re violating can’t protect themselves makes the whole thing feel like punching down.
The justification I hear for this sort of activity is usually to damage Reddit in some way… but it’s not actually Reddit that’s being damaged. It’s other people like all of us who ultimately have been used by Reddit for free labor for the last nearly two decades now. These bots are now victimizing them again in the interest of getting back at the entity who first victimized them… but that should really be their choice since it was their content. It just doesn’t feel justified to me.
Now if you wrote a script that a Reddit user could use that would grab all of their own Reddit posts, post them to an appropriate Lemmy community, and delete them from Reddit (not sure if deleting a Reddit post is even possible at this point 😅), and convinced a bunch of them to use it, that seems to me like the right approach. The users have full agency to decide whether or not their content gets moved, but you’re making it easy for them to do the thing you want them to do.
I’m no staunch defender of copyright, but it sucks that because access to the legal system is expensive, corporations like Reddit get the benefit of the law while regular people like you and me don’t get that if we can’t afford tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal bills. If we’re going to have copyright law, it should definitely protect regular people who take the time to share things with others online for virtually no benefit to themselves just as much if not more than it does massive corporations.
Not a lawyer, but I believe if you want to take content others have posted on Reddit and repost it here, you would violate their copyright on that content. You would want to get their consent before you post it here or else the instance you post them to could start getting DMCA requests and could ultimately be sued. I’m guessing you could also be sued for writing the software that violated the copyright.
It’s not likely to happen but it could. My concern would be less about what ill effects you and/or Lemmy might incur and more around the ethics of taking content belonging to other social media users and reposting it without their permission. Reddit TOS says users retain copyright on their content, so it’s other users’ rights you’re violating in doing so.
Now if you’re talking about a bot that reposts only content you have posted on Reddit, you’re probably in the clear.
Pogs
I pick up something new almost every time I watch Memento.
Every movement, subculture, whatever is just about fashion for 98% of the people involved. Fashion is easy. Values are hard.
The elephant one is one of my favorites. Brings some levity to what might otherwise be a serious situation.
For uncertainty:
For going through a hard time:
Never underestimate the power of denial
Nice try, but I refuse to use any toothpaste that isn’t 3D and HD.
I replaced Reddit with the satisfaction of knowing I won’t be a pawn in Reddit’s plans to monetize the community’s free labor. 😉
You might like Kagi Search. I’ve found the results much better than the alternatives.
Yeah, I get it, but I figure if someone doesn’t understand why it’s a problem to blame someone for having their content stolen, they probably won’t understand why it’s wrong to blame them for having other intangibles stolen either. The transition to tangible object was intentional in hopes of bridging that gap. The only right that is exactly the same as copyright is copyright, but that analogy wouldn’t really work for someone who doesn’t understand how copyright works. 😅 It’s kinda the point of an analogy: to highlight the similarities between two things that are similar in some ways but necessarily different in others for the benefit of someone who understand the subject but not the object of the analogy.
But again, the point isn’t that car ownership is the same as copyright. That’s a (intentional, I think) misunderstanding of how analogies work. They don’t claim that every attribute of the two things being compared is the same; only that there may be enough similarity to bridge a gap in understanding. I can’t see anything so wrong with this analogy that it invalidates the point I was making with it. The point was that having the law commonly ignored doesn’t open the door for victim blaming if they don’t jump through all the hoops armchair lawyers define for them. That’s often the case when the law grants us rights: we just have them at a certain point and don’t have to do anything else. I have a right to continue owning a car that I bought. I have a right not to be punched in the face. I have a right to be involved in my children’s lives. I have a right to continue to own the works I create. These are different rights which apply to different sorts of things, but the principle is the same. If I had made any of these analogies (or any analogy period), a bad faith argument could certainly have found a trivial difference between the two… but it would have been just that: a bad faith argument based on a trivial (for the purposes of this analogy) difference.
Is stealing a Reddit post the same as stealing a car? No, because as everyone has pointed out, the car cannot easily be copied, but is violating someone’s copyright the same as violating their ownership rights over some item they purchased? Yes. When you violate someone’s right to own the car, they do not retain an identical un-violated copy of their right to own it, just the same that way when you violate their copyright, they cannot retain an identical un-violated copy of that right somehow. Both of these rights have been violated equally, and the tangibility of the object they applied to doesn’t change that.