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Critical support for the Lemmy world peeps in their fight against pro-intellectual property nerds
(hexbear.net)
this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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But it is hosted on your home server.
When you subscribe to a community, your home server downloads the content and passes it on to you.
This is not like when The Pirate Bay was allowed to live because it only hosted torrent files and not copyrighted content, in the fediverse, you copy the content to your own server, and pass it on to the client/user, which means hosting the content.
I must admit i don't know exactly what is and isn't in this community, but The Pirate Bay ended being closed because it "facilitated piracy" or something like that. (Of course it didn't actually close but the legal loophole was closed, so legal action could be taken)
I don't remember details but essentially it was decided (in some court, somewhere, i guess) that linking to illegally copied material was also illegal.
IIRC the new loophole became encoding the link to what ever you wanted to copy, for example as base64. That's what's done here, right? (Please correct me if i'm wrong)
My point is that this may, in a legal sense, actually be spreading copyrighted material, and the risk of being sued (no matter if you are in the right) is a very good reason to not run the risk, since the legal system favors deep pockets and good lawyers over challenging the limits of the law.
For good measure, i want to point out that i am absolutely for the free sharing of knowledge and culture. The whole world gains from free access to this. I just also sympathize with not wanting to be a martyr in this battle.
Also, as the person i replied to earlier made me aware, the admin of LW is apparently a homophobic asshole, so fuck that guy.
This proposed change has been discussed in congress, but big tech is fighting it hard, as it would make moderation of social media very expensive and/or restrictive. Basically, certain parties want to hold platforms legally responsible for the content they host, even if that content was posted by users.
It would make it nearly impossible to legally operate a FOSS platform like Lemmy. Fortunately for us, it's one of the few areas where the interests align for both big tech and the common man.
Base64 encoding is not a legal loophole, it's a method to avoid automated content filters on platforms like Reddit and Discord. Encoding a link in base64 offers no legal protections.
I believe we are reffering to two different, but related things.
As i understand your comment, you are reffering to "the platform is responsible for what the users upload to it", or rather whether they are responsible and i am reffering to "(eg.) Torrent sites don't host copyrighted content, they only link to it".
My knowledge about the latter is from many years ago, so i might be wholly or partly wrong.
The former i think is a really interesting balancing act, since i believe that huge platforms that earns billions on hosting user content should be forced to use some of that profit to remove dangerous content, but if that obligation was put on small platforms like Lemmy instances or even the initial Twitter or Facebook, right when they lanched, they would be never be able to get up and running, which would cement the current Big Tech monopolies.
I am not very knowledgable about this specific topic, but i believe the European Unions attempts at solving this is distinguishing between the giants and everybody else, which again, is a great balancing act.
Thank you for correcting me. It makes a lot more sense that you can't just encode something to make it legal.
I don't understand the block either. That community doesn't share copyrighted material. From what I've seen, it doesn't link to copyrighted material. It does have very open pro piracy discussion and discussion about tools that would be used, but neither of those things are illegal.
That's a very fair argument and I appreciate you explaining that, though I don't think it changes my stance on whether I agree with their decision. I feel there's still a difference between hosting it directly vs the federated nature of the platform meaning that the content is copied so it can be served to an end user. Banning the communities feels a bit knee jerk to me, and it doesn't help that the person pushing for the changes is clearly not interested in reasonable discussions about how the platform we're on should or shouldn't dictate ethical choices for their users (and is also a raging homophobe).
Issues with the person pushing mods to make this change aside (since thats essentially irrelevant to whether it was the right call in a vacuum. Doesn't matter that the guy sucks), the decision doesn't sit right with me, even if I can empathize with the provided rationale.
Unfortunately, I'm pretty sure that's not the case. If you "federate" a server with CP for example, you are hosting CP. If it's not brought to your attention, maybe you have a safe harbor exception (and maybe not), but if it IS brought to your attention, you are required to act on it to not be liable. And I airquote "federate" because as I learned Lemmy's architecture, I'm not sure "federated" is the best word to describe it. When I think of federated, I think of something like an orchistrator. A tool where you are directed to the authoritative cluster for content, but not required to join in on it. In such a world, there would be three states - (1) I have a copy of this data, (2) I don't have a copy of this data but link/index it, (3) I refuse to index this data
Lacking #2, I believe, really creates a lot of liability.
I believe even linking or indexing can be problematic. I know Google receives DMCA notices to remove entries from search results. I think your solution is probably the better solution though compared to a lot of others.
One point I would make though is that no one is hosting in this instance pirated material and therefore the other instances are not hosting pirated material. The pirate community is having very open pro-piracy discussions though. Discussion of illegal activity is not the same as illegal activity.
Oh absolutely. I totally agree, but I've seen/heard of situations where talking about illegal activity has been targetted by authorities as "empowering" or "enciting" it. Silly shit, though the authorities haven't gone full nuclear on piracy like they did 20 years ago.
I guess the way to look at it is to ask the question, "Would I do it?" Would I, a person who is doing the public a favor by hosting an instance want to take risk in doing something which may get me into trouble. It's easier to say that YOU should do something because there is little to no risk. We got to be fair to the lemmyworld admins too and see things from their perspective. In addition, things can always change for the worst. What if these communities get even closer to actually sharing "stuff" on Lemmy? I don't know what that would look like but this is the internet and things can change very quickly, for better and most often for worse.
The nice thing about the fediverse is that anyone can create new accounts on the instances which has what they want. Why shit on the lemmyworld admins and why not just go to the instance which works for you instead? Can we all be better human beings?
And that's an issue, and suggests some flaws with Lemmy's architecture. Lemmy UI's should be indexers, no more. This is probably why we keep seeing the push-and-pull of "we must create a giant web" vs" fuck that, small is better". Each lemmy instance is a full-fledged forum solution, storing a copy of the entire network of all other forum solutions we're interested in. Of course it'll never succeed at either.
And now that Lemmy's reached a more critical mass, I'm not sure it could pivot to a better design. Which is a shame. Because it's still better than reddit, but it'll never be what many people loved about what reddit (and digg) used to be.
EDIT: It's not all doom and gloom. I think there's a space for self-hosted apps or clients to make up for that gap, and we already have search indexers to find communities cross-web. I think when we have better multi-user integration, we'll have a lot of opportunity. Like if I had a lemmy.world user primary, and it had a authorizing key, I could maybe have a user on dbzer0.com that has the public key for my lemmy.world and still effectively sign that account in a defederated instance. Enough people have been demanding something like that, I'm sure it'll drop eventually.
How will it even be possible for new instances to get off the ground financially in a few years then?
Federation as it stands right now is a terrible system.
Because they will quickly use up a ton of storage just for showing other instances content, or did i misunderstand you?
That is a good question, but methods like pruning old content from other instances might evolve into a path for solving this (very real problem).
I beg to differ. Right now federation is an okay solution. My proof is that it at least works, and that the problem you mention isn't killing the fediverse (yet).
We should not forget that ActivityPub is a W3C standard, (which itself is a huge milestone for a decentralized internet) and like other similiar standards (eg. HTTP) it can be iterated on and improved when solutions to new or old problems are found.