Muddybulldog

You’re missing the forest through the trees if your take is that anyone is directly comparing the severity of these two issues. The point is that any instance owner that doesn’t have the proper framework in place to mount a legal argument or defense is in a highly vulnerable position regardless of the content.

Being in the right doesn’t matter if you can’t afford the price tag associated with proving it. Just responding to a subpoena or a lawsuit has a non-zero cost associated with it.

By design, yes, but there’s a number of things that can go wrong that can cause the remote instances to not receive (or comply with) the instruction to do so.

Everybody is virtuous and brave when it’s not their ass on the line.

As an administrator of many different public-facing services I’m always going to defend other admins right to moderate their services in whatever manner makes them comfortable, even if I don’t agree with their decision.

Lemmy isn’t one place. It’s hundred of independent places across the globe that communicate with each other. Each subject to the laws where they are hosted, the laws where they provide service and the judgements of their independent administrators.

It’s actually a “mirror” moreso than a cache. There’s a complete, distinct, URL for each piece of mirrored content, that points a specific server and is indexable by search engines independent of the original. Instances ARE hosting the data directly.

Not sure which part of that law you’re going with but I appreciate the arrogance of quoting US law as a silver bullet on a global platform in a thread started on a server in Germany.

Those parentheses are doing a lot of heavy lifting.

I 100% agree with your assessment regarding relative level of risk. On the other hand, knowing LW is hosted in Finland by a German provider does multiply their risk solely by virtue of geography.

Very few instances have proper resources for general moderation never mind sorting out the “hard questions”.

The troll that started this shitshow knew exactly what they were doing. Once the admins were “alerted” they had to act in order maintain “safe harbor” provisions afforded to communications carriers and platforms. While I’m most familiar with the US DCMA, similar legislation and provisions exist in the EU and other locales. Problem is, remote community moderation is somewhat hit or miss right now due to shortcomings in the platform itself. That’s if you even have the resources to look through everything and make a “reasonable” determination on a post by post or comment by comment basis. While I don’t agree with the decision to block these communities I do see how the admins may have reached the conclusion that to do so was their only viable choice, at the moment.

Let’s take the inflammatory subject solely to make a point.

If someone posted CP to !disney_pictures@lemmy.xyz, that content is then immediately copied to every instance that has at least one subscriber to !disney_pictures@lemmy.xyz. It now appears on NEW of the community and the front page of every single one of those instances. It’s not a link to the content, it’s the actual content, hosted on every single once of those instances.

You not convinced there’s the potential for liability for every single one of those instances and their admins?

Are you fully versed on all global laws that directly or indirectly target piracy and copyright infringement? Particularly the really murky ones regarding “facilitating infringement”.

I’m not.

Reddit has a very large, well paid legal team on retainer and the cost of litigation is factored in to their business model. Reddit prevailed in this case and likely spent at least a year of LW’s operating costs doing so.

It doesn’t matter whether you’re right, it’s a matter of being able to afford to prove you’re right.

This is an inaccurate statement. Looking just at US law (there’s plenty of others), CDN’s that reside or operate within the US are required to comply with DMCA takedowns and any other legal requests made of them. Failure to do so jeopardizes their protection under Section 230 of the DCMA. They 100% can be held civilly and criminally liable for what’s in their cache. The US provides a pass, by law, as long as they maintain due diligence.

That’s actually very similar to what this story about Reddit was all about. The film studios were trying to build a case to have RCN stripped of their S230 protections.

That’s one thing that is constantly overlooked, Reddit IS and will remain “better” in this regard because they have commercial backing and revenue to hire lawyers and put up legal fights. “Film studios lose bid to unmask Reddit users who wrote comments on piracy” isn’t going to happen in the Fediverse because most instances don’t have the resources to start the fight, nevermind win it.

Admins and owners of instances can potentially be held criminally and civilly liable for anything that gets hosted on their instance.

To be fair, Hiro has also been very vocal about his willingness to fight these types of battles and has private investors that support those efforts.

Problem is, it IS hosted here. That’s the nature of the Fediverse. It doesn’t just create links to other instances, it creates distinct copies of content on each instance. I am neither viewing this post on lemmy.world nor responding to it via lemmy.world. I am interacting with a distinct copy hosted on a completely unaffiliated instance, in a completely different country.

Your analogy to Google is flawed. Google links to content on other sites. Lemmy sites host distinct copies of content on each instance. While the communities aren’t @lemmy.world communities the content is 100% hosted on Lemmy.world by nature of federation.

• https://lemmy.ml/post/3375472
• https://lemmy.world/post/3234363
• https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2148792

All this post. Hosted on three completely different instances, with different admins. “It’s not actually my community” doesn’t work in the Fediverse.

The risk, however, is that you’re going to be potentially liable for things that you DON’T see but are hosting due to federation.

That’s your prerogative and the upside of the fediverse, as a whole.

The downside is that you may be held legally liable for something you completely had no part, or even knowledge, of simply because your federation has caused content to propagate to your instance. Now it’s on your instance, you’re hosting it and you’re potentially liable.

CTRL+SHIFT+ESC is simply a keyboard shortcut and is useless on a locked up system, it dies with the shell. CTRL+ALT+DEL throws a hardware interrupt, which contributed to the aforementioned bulletproof nature.