mccJun 19

🧵 So to recap something that happened yesterday, as I see it:

Yesterday Mastodon gGmbH sent out an email to mastodon.social and .online users announcing a new TOS. The TOS would take effect July 1, and would ship in the next version of the Mastodon server software as a suggested "template" TOS instances could adopt.

This TOS had multiple problems, and several people said so loudly. This morning, Mastodon announced they're backing off and taking additional legal advice:

https://mastodon.social/@Mastodon/114709820512537821

Show threadmccJun 19

The problems I saw raised were:

Raised by me: The new intellectual property clause was permanent/irrevokable; Mastodon retained rights to your posts even after they were deleted.
https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/issues/35086

Raised by Cory Doctorow: The new TOS forced users to give up the right to sue in court, & forced use of arbitration instead. 😬
https://mamot.fr/@pluralistic/114706885462760813

Raised by Sarah Jamie Lewis and others: It was ambiguous if *other federated servers* counted as "users" under the TOS.
https://mastodon.social/@sarahjamielewis/114699476927561899

New Terms of Service IP clause cannot be terminated or revoked, not even by deleting content · Issue #35086 · mastodon/mastodon

Summary Since it first opened, mastodon.social has operated without any sort of explicit IP grant from the users to the service, which is unusual for a social networking service. Today Mastodon ann...

GitHub
Show threadmccJun 19
When they announced this, Mastodon didn't seem to realize their new terms would be controversial. They also seemed to believe there had been adequate community review time because a version of the TOS had been posted in their git repo for a year. I raise my eyebrow at both these things (didn't think arbitration would be controversial, really?)… but Mastodon *is* a nonprofit that was working with a pro-bono lawyer, and their rapid backoff once the community started engaging shows good faith.
Show threadmccJun 19

This is not over. Mastodon is, I hope? getting better legal advice now— I know Doctorow reached out offering to get the EFF to help— and that will probably by itself fix the ambiguity about who is a "user", and the ambiguity some people complained about whether German or US law was controlling.

However, the new TOS is still coming, and TOSes by nature balance the admins' and the user's interests, so that balance will need to be negotiated. Arbitration, for example, very well might come back.

Show threadmccJun 19
The big problem, as I see it, is that Mastodon is now opening the pandora's box of making the content licensing situation of the Fediverse explicit, which in a federated environment will be *very* hard to do without crushing someone's toes, somewhere. (Personally, I really *liked* that all this time the licensing situation of Mastodon has been implicit; I was happy just letting laches and deletion notices do all the work. But I understand if Mastodon gGmbH doesn't feel they can do that forever.)
Show thread ⸸ cmdr ░ nova ⸸ :~$ 🏳️‍⚧️Jun 19
@mcc In this entire discussion I've seen zero people go "It is at least good that one of the biggest instances is trying to do something about AI content scraping and exploitation" because that's what it's about. Seeing people throw a fit over this makes me feel like, maybe not enough people are taking the threat of AI seriously
Show threadmccJun 19
@daemon_nova Well, first off, since I haven't permitted use of my content for AI scraping, then as far as I know AI scrapers have no permission to use it, and if they're already breaking one law to scrape the server, I don't know why they wouldn't break two. Second off, the terms never mention AI, what they do is ban scraping for any purpose, and although I suspect that's what most users would want, it's not clear to me scraping for archival is something I oppose.
Show thread ⸸ cmdr ░ nova ⸸ :~$ 🏳️‍⚧️
@mcc it was explicitly stated in the e-mail about the ToS change that this is about LLM training
Jun 19 at 10:58pmWeb
Show thread ⸸ cmdr ░ nova ⸸ :~$ 🏳️‍⚧️Jun 19
@mcc Second of all, personally holding the idea that your content isn't allowed to be used in AI training is as useful as someone posting on Facebook "Meta doesn't have the right to use my posts for ads!"
Show threadmccJun 19
@daemon_nova But it isn't. Allowed to be used for AI training, I mean. They don't have a license to use it, and copyright is reserved.
Show thread ⸸ cmdr ░ nova ⸸ :~$ 🏳️‍⚧️Jun 19
@mcc Furthemore, a large instance like mastodon.social actually making _some kind of statement_ against AI is good. Especially due to .social's soft stance on federating with Threads. I'm personally tired of watching all the smaller instances take real action against threats and then mastodon.social is just like "we're the floodgate, anything goes"
Show threadmccJun 19
@daemon_nova Yes, the email is not legally binding, the TOS is