One interesting realization for me with the recent @dolphin / Valve / Nintendo situation is how little people understand the ambiguity of US copyright laws.
Like, people can't fathom that *nobody* has a clue whether emulators for 7th gen consoles might be infringing DMCA anti-circumvention clauses. Lawyers, courts, emulation developers, Nintendo -- no-one. Everyone who cares does know that it operates (and has always operated) in a gray area though.
But "operating in a gray area" doesn't mean you're ethically wrong, or even legally wrong for that matter.
Know what else is "operating in a gray area" copyright wise? Anything involving video reproduction of video games, for example. Most of twitch.tv, good chunks of youtube.com. The game developers that provide the appropriate licensing waivers are far and few between.
What else? The Fediverse you're reading this post on. Instance owners could probably sue each other for years if they cared.
@delroth And when companies do it right by including the "by posting you grant an irrevocable licence to copy, distribute (etc)" clause in their terms and conditions the entire Internet starts yelling about how they're trying to steal your intellectual property.
Which parties? If you mean subcontractors of the video hosting site: tough luck, they need to do that in EU anyway. If you mean federated entities, then (a) users would want the same thing (b) ISTM that the division of responsibility would work well? (c) if people cared about that maybe we'd finally get rid of those extremely silly issues where defederation blocks Delete messages. Do you mean some other kind of third party entity?
@robryk @m one issue I can see for example is that revocability is tricky to ensure in a transitive way across multiple parties.