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.
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.
It's a fundamental misunderstanding of how you automatically have copyright on any written work you produce, and how it's unclear whether any sort of licensing even applies to training data in the US.
Check if you actually saw multiple people or if it was always just a single user called internetpersona. They are the only one I saw doing that but are quite active here, so you might get a wrong impression. Imo this is completely useless.
I dislike it but merely because it normalizes having to sign content with an anti commercialization license to refuse to have your data harvested. Contributing to AI should be opt-in.
WARNING: Any institution or person using this site or any of it's associated sites for study, projects, or personal agenda - You do not have my permission to use any of my profile or pictures in any form or forum, both current or future. You do not have my permission to copy, save, or print my pictures for your own personal use, including, but not limited to, saving them on your computer, posting them on any other website, or this one and passing them off as your own. If you have or do, it will be considered a violation of my privacy and will be subject to all legal remedies.
My simple understanding of the idea is it forces AI companies to have to avoid taking those comments. If they did, they would need to provide attribution to the sources etc.
I should add that there is one approach that could be taken here. Take this with a huge grain of salt because I am not a lawyer.
When you are posting on Lemmy you are likely granting an implicit license to Lemmy server operators to distribute your work. Basically because you understand that posting a public comment on Lemmy will make it available on your and other Lemmy servers it is assumed that it is ok to do that.
In other words you can't write a story, post it on Lemmy, then sue every Lemmy instance that federated the comment and made it publicly available. That would be ridiculous.
There is a possible legal argument that twists this implicit grant to include AI training. Maybe you could have a disclaimer that this wasn't the case. I don't know how you would need to word this and if it would actually change anything. But I would talk to a lawyer.
On a tangent subject, why does everyone push back so forcefully, why do they care so incredibly, why do they enforce group think on you, just for including a link for an open source license in your comments?
I truly don't get the level of fevor, especially when they could just block the user if they don't want to see the license link.
But even more so, why does it trigger people so, why just having that link brings out the worse in people?
Are people trying to format the Internet so they see it exactly how they personally want to see it?
I truly don't understand why we're wasting so much time discussing this.
Is it really just the AI modeling companies that are forcefully trying to keep this from becoming a thing, by astroturfing, because then they really would have to start honoring the license if everyone did it, and if they get caught not doing so fearing the political/marketing and legal ramifications of such?
I would very much like to not be astroturfed/brigaded every 18 to 24 hours because I'm licensing my comments.
Usually the first comment is someone asking me why I'm using a license, then the second comment replying to the first comment is someone else chastising my intelligence and my usage of the license and saying I don't know what I'm doing, and then explaining the completely wrong terms why I'm licensing it, and then the first person from the first comment replies with the third comment saying how dumb or silly or funny I am for doing that, rinse / repeat.
(A funny aside, the pattern I described above, the third comment was identical text, with days separating the two occurrences, and then later on someone went back and changed the third comment on the second most recent occurrence to be worded slightly different, after the fact.)
Another one is I get someone who goes on very very long diatribes asserting law and legalities (even though when I ask them if they are a lawyer they never answer, or they say no), using many paragraphed comments to tell me in every way why I'm wrong, but then finishing their diatribe off with how they really don't care about the subject, but are just giving a friendly explanation to me why I'm getting downvoted, when I didn't ask, and when voting wasn't even being discussed.
And finally, the 10-15ish downvotes on every comment I'm making. (The one that really made me laugh was the one where I reply with one word, "Thanks".)
Just leave me the f alone. If you don't like seeing my comments with a license link, feel free to block me.