What are the possible copyright and other legal issues faced by an individual in the US running a Mastodon server? What are the possible copyright and other legal issues faced by an individual in the US running a Mastodon server? The social network Mastodon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(social_network) has become very popular in the past few months as a possible alternative to Twitter, and there are some important differences between the two services: Twitter is a centralized, corporate-based commercial service, running datacenters in different countries, but operated as one service. Mastodon is decentralized and is run on any number of commercial and private servers by individuals and organizations located in different countries, and server administrators can have little or no formal relationship with other administrators. (The Mastodon software is free and open source and there are no copyright issues with using or modifying the software itself.) Twitter is a for-profit business which has a legal team, a corporate structure to protect employees and assets, and insurance for civil claims. Mastodon administrators may or may not be organized under a corporate structure or have insurance for civil clams. One possible source of copyright issues is that Individual Mastodon servers share posts and content by being &quot;Federated,&quot; meaning being members of relays that share content between independent servers. This means that content by users who have accounts on other Mastodon servers around the world can appear in the timelines of users on any other independent server, and some of that content my be &quot;cached&quot; or stored on those Federated servers. For the sake of this question, the Mastodon instance owner - who is an individual and who runs a server in the US and has the sole account and is the administrator of the server - will be referred to as AMastodonAdmin. The Mastodon instance run by AMastodonAdmin will be referred to as MyMastodonInstance. Can AMastodonAdmin legally &quot;ban&quot; or block users (and their content) who have accounts and post on other servers but their content is shown on MyMastodonInstance by Federation? Can AMastodonAdmin ban users for any reason? Does AMastodonAdmin need a TOS that outlines reasons for user bans and blocks? Is a AMastodonAdmin liable for copyright infringement committed by users who have accounts and post the copyrighted content on other servers which is then Federated to (and in some instances cached on) MyMastodonInstance? Does AMastodonAdmin running MyMastodonInstance in a US datacenter need to be aware of GDPR https://gdpr.eu/ ? Does AMastodonAdmin need to respond to requests by EU members whose posts were federated to MyMastodonInstance?
To the extent that Admin is running a business rather than a free relay server, Admin will have various legal concerns. As I understand the system as you describe it, a user uploads some content to a machine, operated by AMastodonAdmin, which then makes that content available to others. W.r.t. US law, the admin needs to be concerned with a number of things. Copyright violation is one: he may get sued for contributory infringement. The DMCA safe harbor provision reduce the risk, if complied with. Defamation is another potential issue (a publisher is liable for damages under defamation law, as well as the author). &quot;Section 230&quot; may provide protection, but there is a large body of case law mentioned in there that would heave to be taken into consideration – and two upcoming Supreme Court cases. (Basically, Section 230 says that &quot;No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider&quot;). The administrator has a property right to include / exclude anyone they want to, on their machine, except that a contract between Admin and User might limit his right. A TOS is a contract, which typically says &quot;You can use my machine in a specific way as long as you follow these rules&quot;. Requiring payment in exchange for access limits Admin's right to do whatever they want. For free-access systems, there is typically a clause saying &quot;we can kick you off if we want&quot;, though also implying that they will only kick you off for a specific action (&quot;violating community standards&quot;). In order to legally receive content from User, you need permission from User to redistribute their intellectual property (therefore a TOS is virtually mandatory). This would include a warranty from User that they have the right to upload whatever they do upload, granting a correct license to Admin (read the Stack Exchange TOS), and while you are at it, you should say explicitly that if a user misbehaves, they can be banned. Silence is legally problematic, compared to explicit permission or prohibition, because then there may be a long legal wrangle over whether lack of prohibition is implicit permission. Admin technically should care about GDPR, though enforcement may make this a non-issue. A US company operating as Admin would have a real concern with GDPR, but a guy running a free basement server, having no ties to the EU, might ignore GDPR, the same way they might ignore some other nation's law against apostacy.
Someone similar say While it is quite true that no one can have a copyright that excludes all others from preparing their own unique copy of the Bible or other public domain works for copyright protection, our Bibles and other materials are not exactly like any others and are fully protected by copyright laws in all countries So for example, I could theoretically take an ancient public-domain texts and republish it in some modified form. Copyright does not protect the original, but it does protect my modifications. To the extent that Mechon Mamre does include protected material (of their own creation), and Snunit redistributed that material with permission, Mechon Mamre might sue you for copyright infringement. Since they don't say what their creative contribution is, it's hard to evaluate the merits of their claim.
You are asking the wrong question. It should be: When you have downloaded the content and metadata, what are you allowed to do with it and what is forbidden? Somebody owns the copyright to the text and images in the thumbnail. This could be the operator of the third party website, or that site has licensed the content from yet another party. You haven't licensed it from anybody. So you can watch the content in accordance with the TOS, and your computer can evaluate the metadata to do it, but you cannot display it on your own site. Details will differ between jurisdictions, of course. You might also be held responsible for illegal content in the thumb you generate. Follow-up: There seems to be some question of what 'thumbnail' and 'card' mean in this context. This answer assumes a somewhat scaled-down representation of the content of the entire page, not just a collection of actual metadata like content length and expiry.
The band's logo can be protected by both copyright and trademark. The band's name is probably only protected as a trademark. Trademark would not apply to your personal use, because to infringe a trademark, you need to "use" the mark, and "use" in trademark law generally means selling an item that has the mark on it. As far as trademark law is concerned, no sale means no infringement. Copyright protects the exclusive right of the owner to copy a "work" (it's much more complex than that, but we don't need to get into the details here). Copyright probably applies because you would "copy" the logo, which under copyright law is something only the copyright owner can do (absent authorization from the copyright owner). You would therefore theoretically be infringing copyright by copying the bands logo on a shirt or something you want to wear yourself. That said, while I agree with the first answer that fair use may apply in theory, there would never ever be such a complex discussion about fair use in this case... because in fact there's absolutely no chance an individual would get fined or sued for having copied a band's logo and name on something he/she wants to wear his/herself. Getting sued by the band The band will not notice. If you're lucky enough to meet the band (or somebody close to the band) in person while you are wearing your garment, they would either not notice or not care. At worst, they'll ask you where you bought it in case they suspect you bought it from someone who illegally sells fake merch. Even then, all of this seems very unlikely. If you are extremely unlikely and the band notices it and sues you (and finds a lawyer to take a case like that to court), my inclination is to think the judge would be extremely mad with the band (and its lawyer) for losing the court's time with such a trivial matter. No judge would allow lawyers to waste the court's time pleading such a complex thing as fair use in a case like that. Getting fined The police would not notice either, because the only time the police cares about copyright is when somebody makes a complaint (nobody would make a complaint about you), except when they seize containers full of copyright infringing stuff (that is destined to be illegally sold for profit) in a port or at a border somewhere. The only possible scenario where I could imagine that there would be legal consequences is if you wear a t-shirt with the bands logo in a YouTube video (or in a picture) where the only thing that you see basically is the bands logo on your t-shirt. Even this scenario is extremely far fetched, but let's say the video becomes popular and the band notices. Well, the likeliest scenario is that they would file a DMCA notice and get YouTube to take down the video, with very little chances that there would be more important consequences to you. Have fun!
DMCA allows for a counter-notice. You can submit a counter-notice with a statement that you have a licence to distribute the content. Statements in the counter-notice about the facts relating to your permission to reproduce are under penalty of perjury. You could also sue the content owner to attempt to get an injunction against future takedown requests and you could get costs (not punative damages) awarded under 17 USC 512(f).
I can see two points you might be confused about in your question. 1. Works can be in the public domain without having a CC license The Wikipedia statement and the government statement are not inconsistent with each other; just because something isn't available under a Creative Commons license doesn't necessarily mean that it is restricted by copyright. In fact, CC licenses are moot for material in the public domain: When a work is in the public domain, it is free for use by anyone for any purpose without restriction under copyright law. Public domain is the purest form of open/free, since no one owns or controls the material in any way. ... Creative Commons licenses do not affect the status of a work that is in the public domain under applicable law, because our licenses only apply to works that are protected by copyright. So if a work is in the public domain, you can use it for whatever purpose you wish (though see below), without restriction or attribution. This is less restrictive than the various Creative Commons licenses, which require various levels of attribution, non-modification, etc. depending on the license chosen by the creator. 2. Trademark protections are separate from copyright protections Your quote from the government website implies that these logos might be trademarked, even if they're not under copyright; this is entirely possible. Roughly speaking, trademark protections keep other people from trading on your good name &amp; reputation; copyright protections keep other people from directly profiting from your creative endeavors. If another party creates a product that uses a trademark in a way that would create confusion among consumers, the trademark holder can sue for that. Depending on how you use the logos, you might run afoul of these protections. See this Q&amp;A for futher details under US law. (Australian law may differ a bit but I would expect that the general principles are the same.)
This seems to be a mix of question about law and a meta-question about this site, but I'll treat it as an on-topic question about law. The author of a question, or answer, owns the copyright to their contributions, and they can re-publish to their heart's content. Any user who posts here grants a license to SE and other users to use content posted here, so I don't have to ask you permission to quote you. As part of the permission granted by SE to use this website, you have agreed to &quot;follow the rules&quot; set by SE. There are many rules, some spelled out more clearly that others. For example, if you post a question, you indirectly agreed that your content can be upvoted or down-voted. Certain content can be &quot;closed&quot; and deleted, when the content is deemed to violate the rules in particular ways (is spam, porn, abuse, or judged to be poor-quality). Judgment (on different matters) can be rendered by community managers, moderators, or other users. The agreement is here, see especially here. If we take the post that you linked to, it is quite possible that it was deleted because it is not a general legal question, in violation of the acceptable use policy. If you want a historical analysis of your particular case, it should be asked on Law Meta.
There is no case law as yet However, the most likely situation is that there is no copyright in the original works because they are computer-generated. There is certainly copyright in the code that created the art but the output of that code, the art itself, would probably not be subject to copyright. Copyright only exists in art created by humans. The US Ninth Circuit has held that animals cannot create copyrighted works. Subsequently, the US Copyright office has rejected applications for registration (a prerequisite to a suit in the US) of computer-generated art because it “lacks the human authorship necessary to support a copyright claim.” While this position has not been tested in the courts, I don't think they are any more likely to grant copyright to a program than they were to a monkey. What's going on? The OP states that there is litigation: there isn't. What there is, is a DCMA takedown request from Larva Labs. If this is complied with that will be the end of the matter; if it isn't then there may be litigation. However, before Larva Labs could sue CryptoPunks in the US they would first need to get a writ of mandamus to force the USCO to register it. If they try and fail then there will be a legally binding court decision that Larva Labs don't own the copyright in any of their computer-generated art. Which kills their business model and, presumably, them. This would be a very high-risk move. They may choose to sue in a jurisdiction where registration is not a prerequisite, however, that court would still need to be satisfied that there was a copyright that could be breached. So that's just a different take on the same problem. I have ignored the issue of NFTs as these are legally problematic in their own right and irrelevant to the main question. However, the NFT and the artwork are not the same thing.