[timbray]

Everybody's saying "well of course you can't stop people crawling so just give up." I don't buy it - you also can't stop people from driving too fast or smoking in restaurants or torrenting popular movies. That's why we have lawyers and courts and legislation.

If Mastodon gets content licensing right, you'll still be able to ignore it and go ahead and crawl data when the license forbids, it scratches your itch and you're ethically challenged. But then if you do anything with that data in public you're going to get legal nastygrams. That may not even stop you, but it will drive up the cost of your lack of ethics.

Ask any security pro. You can't ever stop all the attackers. All you can do is make it more and more expensive to do bad stuff, and eventually most of them won't have a strong enough incentive to pay the price.

There are plenty of people on Mastodon - the vast majority is my bet - who, when there's a choice of content licenses, will cheerfully say "make it public", and then there will be excellent full-text search.

[miracle2k]

I don't really get the proposal.

Are you saying there is currently confusion as to whether a Mastodon user inadvertently issues a license for their copyrighted content to be included in full text search, simply by using Mastodon?

If not, what is preventing someone from sending a legal nastygram now, given that no such licenses currently being granted?

Or are you saying that Mastadon users are not able to legal prevent indexing based on copyright alone (i.e. fair-use, or not substantial enough to qualify for copyright protection), and thus we need to force followers into some kind of private contract that they would break?

[saurik]

This is covered in the article and what is missing is a login wall, due to the legal precedents being set in (as one example) the LinkedIn case.

[tptacek]

You can in fact stop people from smoking in restaurants.

[OctopusLupid]

I believe they meant physically. Just because you can't stop people physically smoking doesn't mean you can't stop them by social or legal (which reflects social) means.

Similarly, just because you can't stop people from indexing Mastodon physically, doesn't mean that you can't stop them by social or legal means. However, I would add that the internet is really hard to control because of how open it is, which is why we patch security vulnerabilities instead of only relying on publicly shaming or arresting malicious actors on the internet.

[int_19h]

Realistically, what's going to happen with "courts and legislation" is that anyone who wants to do scraping will simply operate from the jurisdiction where it's legal. That's the crucial difference between regulating roads or restaurants, and regulating stuff on the Internet, at least in the absence of Great National Firewalls.