Post #1916983

2026-04-25 19:57 UTC

@madsenandersc If we just conclude that AI scrapers are bad actors and won't respect anything, there isn't much to do... but if at least, we put up a boundary, then they can't claim we didn't say so? Otherwise, it's just a free pass at scraping the Fediverse and using the data for whatever purpose...

Replies (1)

@madsenandersc@social.vivaldi.net 2026-04-25 20:10

@benjaoming I'll be the devils advocate here. If the protocol forbids scraping, who is to blame in a legal fight if scraping occur? The application provider? Because the scraper never touched anything related to the protocol and never saw if the flag was set on the post. Is the flag to be set at all times? Can you prove that the content was transported by the ActivityPub protocol, and that the scaper definitely was aware of that? Because if you can't, legal action is not possible anyway. This is not about what is right and what is desireable, it's about what is possible to prove in a courtroom and who you can blame for any misdeed. I am pretty sure that a good lawyer will be able to shift the blame to the application displaying the content to the scraper, or at least make the case that the scraper had no way of knowing that this particular content was off-limit. Yes, you can implement an extension of the protocol with the field you talk about, but it will be of no use at all, unless you get all possible Fediverse clients to agree to that field and implement precautions against scraping if the user has set the field. If the scraper is successful anyway, the Fediverse client will be the one to blame for not implementing the precauitions well enough.

Open ##1916984