espresto/reclaim-social-media

Legal Issues

Opened this issue · 6 comments

heibie commented

Hey

@guidocorleone was asking me, if i had thought about some legal issus, when using reclaim. and i had to admit: no.

but it's evident. when you copy content to your reclaim-site, which is not your content, you are risking to get, what in germany is called a "Abmahnung" (couldn't find the appropriate english word).

the only solution, which comes quickly to my mind, is password-protection of the whole reclaim-installation.

have you thought about that issue?

heiko

blackghostosint commented

could it be called curation?

"Digital curation is the selection, preservation, maintenance, collection and archiving of digital assets. Digital curation establishes, maintains and adds value to repositories of digital data for present and future use. This is often accomplished by archivists, librarians, scientists, historians, and scholars."

"Content curation is the process of collecting, organizing and displaying information relevant to a particular topic or area of interest. Services or people that implement content curation are called curators. Curation services can be used by businesses as well as end users."

Once it's online and there are share features on the posts, isn't it meant to be shared?

esprestoag commented

i’m no expert in legal questions. that said, here are my thoughts:

when reclaim grabs third party content from instagram, twitter, youtube, vine or flickr (i.e. because of favs or retweets/revines) it tries to use their widgets instead of copying the content. that policy is a little inconsistent when onde shares content on facebook. reclaim grabs and saves all content, that the facebook api provides.

regarding the retrieval of og:image (and og:title, og:summary) data: thats a tough one. on one side, this is how publishers prepare their content for republication on facebook. they want nice teaser images to be shown when people share their content on facebook (or twitter). by using open graph markup they advertise their content and tell sites that share their content: this is what we want you to use as a thumbnail, summary and title. one might ask: why should the use of copyrighted material be fine when used on facebook or twitter, but not on a private site?

regarding your own content: reclaim tries to grab as much of your content as it can get and i think it’s not only fine, but the main reason why reclaim exists. the flickr plugin tries to get your images as original, the g+ plugin even tries to download image gallerys (facebook gallery download is broken right now, i think) and at one point it would be nice if there was an option for the youtube-plugin, that it can save a high resolution mp4 file of the clips that you uploaded to youtube.

may be one thing could ease the legal fears: making grabbing of the og:image data optional.=

heibie commented

@Frank-Schwarz that sounds reasonable to me, but i'm quite sure, there will be some lawyers seeing it a different way and send you a nice letter, demanding some money for violating copyright laws;-)

@esprestoag
"it tries to use their widgets instead of copying the content"
the reason, why i use reclaim is because i don't want to use the widgets for reliable archiving of my social-media-content. e.g. twitter shuts down it's services, the widgets won't show any more content.

Facebook and og:image:
i would say, for the most publishers, it should be no problem using their thumb/preview-images, because they published them for promotional issues. but e.g. in 2008 i took part, for whatever reason, in the never ending movie quiz and Reclaim copied an image of Johnny Depp on my server. perhaps a disney-lawyer won't be amused about that. or i shared an image of famous german cartoonist Ralf Ruthe on facebook, which was also copied as a thumbnail to my server.

Regarding more than 5000 and counting entries in my reclaim-blog, i think it's impossible to keep track of every single image, i host on my server.

until there is no secure, legal solution, like a "fair use" commitment, the only solution for beeing save i see right now, is protecting your reclaim-installation by password.

diplix commented

the idea of "reliable archiving of“ your social-media-content is indeed the idea behind reclaim. however, if it’s about third party content like tweets or instagrams you faved it’s not really your content. thats why reclaim defaults to showing widgets for third party. that doesnot mean however, that you can’t save those images in your reclaim media folder.

instead of closing down the whole reclaim blog with a password, it might already be sufficient just to deny search bots from accessing it (robots.txt exclude)

heibie commented

robots.txt is of course a good idea. but that can't give you 100% security. right now, i'm not quite sure, how i will proceed with my installation, but i think there should be some kind of hint in the documentation for newbie users. i will write also a blog post about that topic the next days.