Most instances don’t have a specific copyright in their ToS, which is basically how copyright is handled on corporate social media (Meta/X/Reddit owns license rights to whatever you post on their platform when you click “Agree”). I’ve noticed some people including Copyright notices in posts (mostly to prevent AI use). Is this necessary, or is the creator the automatic copyright owner? Does adding the copyright/license information do anything?
Please note if you have legal credentials in your reply. (I’m in the USA, but I’d be interested to hear about other jurisdictions if there are differences)
IANAL. However I know a bit.
Yes, this is how it works. You give them a license to your posts.
The creator automatically owns the copyright. People can put in license terms, but they’re effectively useless in this context. Let’s say OpenAI violates the copyright on your post (it’s still an open question whether or not training AI on copyrighted data constitutes copyright infringement, but we’ll assume it does). Your only recourse is to sue them if they do this. Because you never registered the copyright, you’re limited to recovering actual damages – if you do register the copyright you can get statutory damages, which are up to $150k per violation. So how much money did you lose on the ability to commercially exploit this post that OpenAI took away from you by copying your posts? Less than the cost to bring the suit, I’m sure.
So the TL;DR here is that the anti-AI licensing thing is only effective if you’re registering the copyright on your posts/comments. And even then, that’s only true if AI training is considered to be copyright infringement.