Webmentions, copyright and privacy

Kev Quirk recently published an interesting post wondering if webmentions violate privacy. Someone’s argument to him was that an individual posting on one website did not ‘realise – or explicitly consent to – their replies being republished on an external blog’. This is an interesting argument against privacy violations, but not the strongest one. That would be what Kev calls ‘deletion persistence’. Along the same lines, it is also worth considering whether webmentions violate copyright. Let us start with copyright because it is more straightforward. In many aspects, privacy is comparable to copyright. The Center for Internet and Society at Stanford Law School briefly discussed something similar over ten years ago, asking whether copying and pasting Tweets is illegal and concluding that it may well be, but it would depend on the contents of the Tweet. A few years after that, an American court ruled that embedding can violate copyright especially if the content originally posted held…