this post was submitted on 08 May 2024
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Instead of solely deleting content, what if authors had instead moved their content/answers to something self-owned? Can SO even claim ownership legally of the content on their site? Seems iffy in my own, ignorant take.
Everything you submit to StackOverflow is licensed under either MIT or CC depending on when you submitted it.
Regardless of the license (apart perhaps from public domain) it is legally still your copyright, since you produced the content. Pretty sure in EU they cannot prevent you from deleting your content.
But those two licenses give everyone an irrevocable right to do certain things with your content forever and displaying it on a website is one of those things (assuming they follow the other requirements of the license).
If StackOverflow teach me something, that is that legal jargon about copyright isn't very efficient again ctrl+C/ctrl+V
They absolutely can, you gave them an explicit (under most circumstances irrevocable) permission to do so. That’s how contracts work.
Unlike in US, and I cannot speak for all of EU, but at least in Finland a contract cannot take away your legal rights.
You can when it comes to copyright. That’s EU-law and anything else would be such a horrible idea that no country would ever set up a law saying otherwise.
If you could simply revoke copyright licenses you would completely kill any practicality of selling your copyrighted works and it would fully undermine any purpose it served in the first place.
So does that mean anyone is allowed to use said content for whatever purposes they'd like? That'd include AI stuff too I think? Interesting twist there, hadn't thought about it like this yet. Essentially posters would be agreeing to share that data/info publically. No different than someone learning how to code from looking at examples made by their professors or someone else doing the teaching/talking I suppose. Hmm.
CC (not sure about MIT) virtually always requires attribution, but as GitHub Copilot showed right now open-"media" authors have basically no way of enforcing their rights.
Probably cuz they gave them away when they open licensed....you know...how it's supposed to work
In most jurisdictions you can't give away copyright - that's why CC0 exists. And again most open-source and CC licences require attribution, if you use those licences you have a right to be attributed
For super permissible licenses like MIT then it's probably fine. Maybe folks would need to list the training data and all the licenses (since a common requirement of many of even the most permissible licenses is to include a copy of the license).
As far as I know, a court hasn't ruled on whether clauses like "share alike" or "copy left" (think CC BY-SA or GPL) would require anything special or not allow models. Anyone saying otherwise is just making a best guess. My best guess is (pessimistically) that it won't do any good because things produced by a machine cannot be copyrighted. But I haven't done much of a deep dive. I got really interested in the differences between many software licenses a few years back and did some reading but I'm far from an expert.
So they have to carefully only source the MIT data?
It hasn't been tested in court so any answer anyone gives is only a best guess.
They can. It's in the TOS when you make your account. They own everything you post to the site.
Well I suppose in that case, protesting via removal is fine IMO. I think the constructive, next-step would be to create a site where you, the user, own what you post. Does Reddit claim ownership over posts? I wonder what lemmy's "policies" are and if this would be a good grounds (here) to start building something better than what SO was doing.
A SO alternative cannot exist if a user who posted an answer owns it. That defeats the purpose of sharing your knowledge and answering questions as it would mean the person asking the question cannot use your answer.
Couldn't these owners dictate how their creations are used? If you don't own it, you don't even get a say.
That's the point of platforms like SO - you give away your knowledge, for free, for everyone, for any use case. If a user can restrict the use of their answers, then it makes no sense for SO to exist. It's like donating food to a food bank and saying that your food should only go to white people and not black people.
I'm not sure I agree with your example - it's more like giving the owners of the donation the ability to choose WHO they are donating to. That means choosing not to donate to companies that might take your food donation and sell it as damaged goods for example. I wouldn't want my donation to be used that way. Thats how I see it anyway
That is true of a lot of sites, but not SO.
From: https://stackoverflow.com/help/licensing