I know what the Creative Commons is but not this new thing or why it keeps popping up in comments on Lemmy
Because people don’t understand how copyright works.
In most countries any copyrightable work that you produce is automatically covered by copyright. You don’t need to do anything additional to gain that protection.
Most Lemmy instances don’t have any sort of licensing grant in their terms of service. So that means that the original author maintains all ownership of their work.
So technically what these people are doing is granting a license to their comment that allows it to be used for more than would otherwise be allowed by the default copyright protections.
What they are probably trying to accomplish is to revoke the ability for commercial enterprises to use their comments. However that is already the default state so it is pretty irrelevant. Basically any company that cares about copyright and thinks that what they are doing isn’t allowed as fair use already wouldn’t be able to use their comments without the license note. So by adding the license note all they are doing is allowing non-commercial AI to scrape it (which is probably not what was intended). Of course most AI scraping companies don’t care about copyright or think that their use is not protected under copyright. So it is again irrelevant.
Ding ding ding. It’s basically the equivalent of that “I don’t give Facebook permission to use my statuses, pictures, etc for commercial purposes…” chain letter that boomers love to post. It has enough fancy legalese and sounds juuuust plausible enough that it’ll get anyone who doesn’t already understand the law.
It reads like a sovcit claim.
It’s meaningless bullshit if they think the AI companies give a shit about copyright
Even moreso: When you post online you typically give the website a license to distribute the content in the terms and conditions. That’s all the license they need, it doesn’t matter what you say in the comments.