Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this necessary, or is the creator the automatic copyright owner? Does adding the copyright/license information do anything?
Please note if you have legal credentials in your reply. (I’m in the USA, but I’d be interested to hear about other jurisdictions if there are differences)
On top of all comments generally being copyrighted by their author automatically, the licence at the bottom of a comment is like a no trespassing sign. The sign itself doesn’t stop people from trespassing. You still need to call police when someone trespasses. If you never call police then the sign is literally useless.
The licence is the same thing. If someone includes it at the bottom of all their comments, but never launches legal action when someone violates that licence agreement, then it’s literally useless. Given that launching legal action is incredibly expensive, I highly doubt the people using these licences will ever follow up. Also, how will they even know? How will they know a company used their comment as training data for their commercial AI? How are they going to even enforce the terms of the licence?
This is a really good point. If someone did violate your copyright, you have to enforce it. Almost no one is going to do that, so it’s effectively not copyrighted.
There’s a lot of “you couldn’t have been murdered because that’s illegal” thinking that somehow putting up a license on your posts stops these AI companies from scraping.