You know, if I've noticed anything in the past couple years, it's that even if you self-host your own site, it's still going to get hoovered up and used/exploited by things like AI training bots. I think between everyone's code getting trained on, even if it's AGPLv3 or something similarly restrictive, and generally everything public on the internet getting "trained" and "transformed" to basically launder it via "AI", I can absolutely see why someone rational would want to share a whole lot less, anywhere, in an open fashion, regardless of where it's hosted.
I'd honestly rather see and think more about how to segment communities locally, and go back to the "fragmented" way things once were. It's easier to want to share with other real people than inadvertently working for free to enrich companies.
In contrast, if I uploaded something to a social media site like Instagram, and then Meta "sublicensed" my image to someone else, I wouldn't have much to say there.
Would love someone with actual legal knowledge to chime in here.
but you agreed to this, when agreeing to the TOS.
> I post a picture on my site that is then used by a large publisher for ads, I would (at least in theory) have some recourse
which you didn't sign any contract, and therefore it is a violation of copyright.
But the new AI training methods are currently, at least imho, not a violation of copyright - not any more than a human eye viewing it (which you've implicitly given permission to do so, by putting it up on the internet). On the other hand, if you put it behind a gate (no matter how trivial), then you could've at least legally protected yourself.
In fact, I never consented for anyone to access my server. Just because it has an IP address, does not make it a public service.
Obviously in a practical sense that is a silly position to take, and in prior cases there is usually an extenuating factor that got the person charged, eg breaking through access controls, violating ToS, or intellectual property violations.
But I don't rescind the prior statement. Just because I have an address doesn't mean you can come in through any unlocked doors.
If you don't take any steps to make it clear that it's not public, like an auth wall or putting pages on unguessable paths, then it is public, because that is what everyone expects.
Just like you if you have a storefront, if the door is unlocked you'd expect people to just come in and no one would take you seriously if you complain that people keep coming in if you don't somehow make it clear that they're not supposed to.
ie if you were an art gallery, the expectation would be people could come in and look, but you don't expect them to come in, photograph everything and then sell prints of everything online.