@Hawkwinter @aral

I am not an attorney, this is not legal advice.

It's a *very* slippery slope. Currently the entire fediverse works on a good-faith basis, where we don't worry about the copyrights of posts. Once that kind of mindset arrives here, it's going to lead to a lot of destruction.

For one: Federated servers continuously copy from each other, simply due to how the technology works. Servers have to cache posts from other servers locally, even though nobody gave them permission.

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@Hawkwinter @aral

It would be 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘳𝘦𝘭𝘺 too easy for a slew of copyright trolls to come along, make an account on a tainted server (perhaps one of their own), create an account that easily can go viral with original copyrighted works, wait for the works to proliferate through the fediverse, and then sue any server that has copies of the work.

The only things that make this a little inconvenient are the different jurisdictions servers are in.

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@Hawkwinter @aral

Currently, we just don't have the numbers and the server operators are too poor to make this viable, but it's ripe for the picking.

What would be required to stave this off would be a unified TOS that most servers would incorporate that would allow that kind of sharing. And that, in turn, would require more skilled copyright attorneys to work it out. Perhaps the EFF might help in that regard.

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@Kathrin @aral

I see what you mean. A compatible ToS check baked into the federation handshake to determine if and how the servers communicat, and setting the terms at the server level rather than individual users.

I also see what you mean about it being something that would be hard to do without something like the EFF.