Copyright has fair use provisions, and one could argue that a bridge that lets you public content on a different network is no different than providing a VCR-to-DVD service.

[–] Breve@pawb.social -1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Well, go ahead and take a music video your favorite artist posted publicly on X and upload it to YouTube unaltered and see how far fair use gets you with the defense that the content was publicly available. 🤷

[–] rglullis 6 points 9 months ago (1 children)

That's is not the right analogy. No one is making the bridge and saying "I can take the content from person A on Lemmy and sell it on Bluesky". they are just saying "Here is a copy of what Person A posted on Lemmy".

In terms of copyright, why is it okay from someone on a different Mastodon server to relay content from a Lemmy server and even redistribute it (through, e.g, RSS readers), but it's not okay for a bridge to redistribute it to a Bluesky server?

[–] Breve@pawb.social 1 points 9 months ago (1 children)

Those examples are all forms of linking back to the content which is still hosted by the original server in which it was posted. Effectively they are sharing links to the content over the content itself, because if the hosting server removes the content then it is no longer available through those other mediums. And yes there are caching mechanisms involved, but those fall to the personal use case because the cache is not made publicly available.

For these bridge services to work, they are creating and hosting duplicates of the content. That is the biggest difference. If BlueSky actually federated then they would not be rehosting the content either.

[–] rglullis 4 points 9 months ago

Lemmy's federation model is that all posts and comments get replicated across all instances. If an instance goes down, the copied content still will live in my instance. It's not just caching.