When you post on Twitter(1) or Bluesky(2) you grant them a broad perpetual license to use, modify, and sublicense your content. You effectively make them co-owners of your content. They can mine it and monetize it. They can even sell it. When you post on Mastodon(3) most instances take no license at all. That's right, they tell you what they are doing with your content—storing posts and delivering them—but no license.
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#twittermigration #TermsOfService #PrivacyPolicy #ContentLicense
Twitter and Bluesky (and almost all corporate social media providers) say they need a broad license to do what they do. But the truth is that they don’t need a license to publish your content—or they could take a much more limited publishing only license—but they don’t because the way they make money is processing your content, profiling you, and selling information about you to ad tech companies. For this they need to co-own your content.
@diazona Thanks, sorry for the confusion. The post you replied to is 2/3 in a thread in which the top post says: "You effectively make them co-owners of your content." The sentence in 2/3 relates to that previous context, but it is not as clear as it should be. Secondarily, not sure, but the rationale could be along the lines of it being you that is reproducing the copies by posting your content. Mastodon may simply be the technology you are using to do so.
@mastodonmigration On the idea of you (the poster) being the one who is reproducing the content: that's an interesting angle but not one that I've ever seen put forward in my prior reading about copyright. The conventional interpretation is that you, the author, distribute a copy of your content to the website operator, e.g. the Mastodon server owner. The website operator will then choose to make additional copies of that content and distribute those copies to other people, e.g. end users or other server owners. The software of Mastodon/Twitter/Bluesky are simply means of making and distributing all those copies. I suspect it'd be a bit tough to argue that you (author) are the one making and distributing all the copies, because it's the site operator, not you, who is choosing who gets a copy. Dunno if things would be different from a legal perspective on a site with fine-grained access controls. (2/2)
Mastodon Migration
David Zaslavsky