@toon @fediversenews I’m not a lawyer, so you’ll have to test things out in whatever place you live.
Nevertheless, but the greater concern for me isn’t indexing but access to your public feed. And de-federation does not prevent access.
toon@toonvandeputte.be 5 weeks ago
@atomicpoet @fediversenews But does it prevent them from doing so *legally*? I can create searchable indexes of lots of things I find online, but that's often a copyright violation.
atomicpoet@atomicpoet.org 5 weeks ago
uastronomer@mastodon.monoceros.co.za 5 weeks ago
@toon @atomicpoet @fediversenews
So first up, I'm not an IP lawyer, or any other kind of lawyer, so I can only talk about how big online copyright cases have played out, from what was reported in the media, but I reckon that indexing is entirely legal.
Search engines have been indexing the content of every website they can find for over 30 years. This includes stuff that the owners really didn't want indexed. There have been many well-publicized cases of Google and friends indexing stuff that should have been protected but that wasn't, including private medical records, plaintext password databases, classified government documents, internal company documents, and more. A popular hacking technique is to simply use google to search for filenames that might contain sensitive data (maybe something like "Patient admissions filetype:xlsx")
As far as I know, no search engine has ever been found guilty of breaking the law by doing this, and nobody has ever successfully sued.
Closest I can think of to real legal problems for indexers was when Google started bulk-scanning copyrighted books, and making them available in books.google.com
That was a long time ago so I don't remember much of the reporting, but based on how that website works now, I suspect that the only copyright issue that stuck was "You can't just give copies away", The index remains, and you can read excerpts of books, but not the whole text.