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this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2025
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No it doesn't because all mastodon data is public and does not require ToS agreement to be collected.
Mastodon could only argue damages but that would be impossible to litigate in any extent due to decentralized and free nature of Mastodon and Fediverse. Except for some backward countries like China or Japan where there's no information freedom protections and any corporation can sue you for damages for any information infringement (even if it's not yours).
This is a good thing. Mastodon shouldn't control anything related to the legality of data flowing in the fediverse - that's the entire point.
The way copyright law works, by default you don't have any right to make use of anything, even if it's posted publicly. Why do people allow Fediverse platforms to do the thing they do? Leniency on their part.
Gathering data from Mastodon for AI training is technically feasible, but that doesn't mean it's legally justified. Many people will object to that. Many already do!
No that's not how copyright works. Copyright prohibits distribution not copying.
Er, yes, my point was copyright very much concerns what you're allowed to do with data. But that goes beyond distribution. Derivative works are a complicated topic.
My point stands, whether you technically can copy stuff has no bearing on whether you're allowed to use it and for what purpose.
Well it depends on the use. If its a movie that I copied then I can watch it, if it's a picture I can print it and put it on a wall at my home. Even AI training currently its considered to be entirely legal to train on copyrighted data. You can even parse copyrighted data for analytics which is entirely legal as well.
So you can do a lot with copyrighted data without breaching the copyright, including AI training as it's the article topic.
Private use of the copyrighted works is pretty much a separate topic entirely.
And while the law isn't settled on the topic, it's wrong to argue AI training is something that happens entirely in a private setting, especially when that work is made available publicly in some form or another.
Sure, there's a problem with the current copyright laws that has to be addressed. It's quite similar to the "TiVo loophole" in OSS licenses. It was addressed, and certainly not in favour of the loophole exploiters. That one could be fixed on licence level because it was ultimately a licence question, but the AI training question, however, needs to be taken to the legislation level. Internationally, too.
I don't think this precedence will ever get set because we don't have universal global IP protections. The west will never set it due to fear of China winning the AI race.
In their opinion (which I agree with) this is the greater good and someone's mastodon posts or similar being fed to AI training machine is a lesser evil compared to losing technological advantage to the biggest authoritarian state in the world.