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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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I genuinely do understand concerns about legal issues and the risk of facilitating illegal activities- but its not even hosted on their instance, why would it mater that the communities EXIST. They're literally hosted by someone else...?
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.