The admin of the Mastodon instance cyberspace.social just received an AI powered notice to delete the parody account @microsoft@lea.pet
The admin of the Mastodon instance cyberspace.social just received an AI powered notice to delete the parody account @microsoft@lea.pet
I’ve said this before. The UK online safety act if they enforce it hard against fediverse instances, it will be the end of federation, for UK users without a VPN at least. Because it puts too much on the shoulders of small site operators.
In this case though, the exception most countries have for site operators to avoid being responsible for their user’s posts is usually reliant on action being taken when content on your site is reported to you. There isn’t really an exception for saying “Umm, wasn’t from my site mate. Go follow the trail and get the original guy”. The argument will be, the site you control has the content, remove it.
In the UK in the 1990s there was a court case [1] that might even form the part of the case law behind the publisher exception. In that case the claimant stated that the ISP was alerted to forged usenet articles (usenet was pretty much a good analogue for modern federated content) that he believed defamed him. They did not remove the articles (presumably because they did not originate on their usenet server, by their users I am not sure). He sued them and the court ruled in his favour. There’s more nuance, but the take away is pretty much what we got in the law created later.
Since then we have enacted the Defamation Act 2013 [2], which has section 5 that gives SOME exemption to operators of websites that allow posts by third parties (that pretty much covers the fediverse). That makes it clear that if the claimant cannot identify the user (which would be the case for 99% of threadiverse users), and if you are informed about the content and do not take action, then you may be held accountable for the defamation. Now that just means that if they tell you X post is defamatory or should be removed for another legal reason, if you refuse to do so in a reasonable time period, then you can be held responsible and treated as the publisher of that message. So if it were to breach some law, they could sue you for it as if you posted it yourself. Which is kinda why I’d say just remove it if there’s any doubt at all. I’m not a legal expert, but that’s how I read the act.
I’m not sure how it works elsewhere. I live in the UK. But generally the rules are somewhat similar.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godfrey_v_Demon_Internet_Service [2] https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2013/26/section/5
Very interesting.
I’m making a decentralised open source sharing protocol (have your free cloud drive, website, …) and I very often gets the question about what if my node shares some illegal stuff (because when someone shares yours, you share theirs)?
It’s all encrypted so a node cannot know what it shares, and if someone asks you to take down abc.xyz then we’ll do it and it should be the end of the story.
Seems that’s what it would be in the UK at least (and the rest of the EU usually doesn’t have harsher laws for what I know), what are your thought?
On the one-hand I think it would be similar to how usenet works now for binaries. That is, once notified under DMCA (for the USA) and likely similar laws in other western countries you’re duty bound to remove it.
I don’t know if there would be other problems with hosting files when you don’t know what they are. Also in terms of defence against DMCA, how would the original file uploader defend against it when you can’t know what the file is without the key. Person A reports file xyz as infringing their copyright, Uploader B says it doesn’t. Normally you could re-instate it and let the two parties fight it out in court. But, I wonder how it would play out when you hosting the file don’t even know what it is.
I’m really not sure how it would really stack up against copyright law in general and more specifically laws for truly illegal content (e.g. CSAM), since you could be hosting that and never know.
Seems a bit more of a risky venture to me and more a question for an actually qualified legal advisor I’m afraid.
CSAM or any illegal content, or is there a specific legal difference?
The protocol is robust, so if a node removes the shared data, it just goes elsewhere. In-fine it’s the original sharer doing any potential illegal thing IMO but laws are not always logical nor moral.
Any idea where one would be able to get some answers from some real legal experts? Pro bono ofc 😰.