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With Meta exploring the fediverse, would it be possible to create a copy-left federation license to block for-profit entities from federating with a server? (kbin.social)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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I.E. a way to legally enforce that servers which federate with you are not allowed to serve ads alongside content from your server, and must be run by not-for-profit entities?

I'm curious about some sort of strategy that blocks Meta from extracting money from the content creators in the current fediverse by using legal licensing of some sort, similar to how the GPL software license requires any derivative software to be open source.

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[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I don't think is going to work, because all license discussions break down to is lawsuits, and you have less of a legal war chest than they do. If you think the government would step in on the behalf of federated creators rather than a major corporation, you don't know how the world works. As it stands, there's going to be users, like me, who will join that service if it means communicating with people in Meta's sphere of influence that we care about.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Sure, but having the legal standing in the first place is a good idea.

And secondly, if the licensing is done on individual posts and owned by the user, systematic disregard for that seems like it would be good grounds for a class action, which can be incredibly lucrative, and therefore attractive, to large law firms.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

All of that would equally apply to the use of GPL code, which corporations absolutely do take very seriously.

I won't pretend the legal system is exactly fair or that money doesn't matter, but if the facts are blatantly on your side, as they would be in this case, there's more than enough funding from groups like the EFF to win it.