this post was submitted on 14 Aug 2023
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Piracy: ꜱᴀɪʟ ᴛʜᴇ ʜɪɢʜ ꜱᴇᴀꜱ
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Just replace "Lemmy instance" with "blog", and the answer is obvious.
"consider a Mexican user visiting a blog located in Germany to view Nazi content."
The user is subject to Mexican laws. The blog owner would be subject to German laws. The instance owner is likewise subject to German laws.
Adding additional parties doesn't change anything. For example, if a Mexican user on a Swiss VPN views content originating from a blog in Germany, then the user, the VPN, and the blog are all subject to laws of their own jurisdiction.
Those laws can regulate what content you can access, what content you can host, or both.
Actually it's not because there's no 3rd party like there is with Lemmy and especially not a 3rd party that's keeping a cache (copy) of the content.
So there's no American users on lemmy.ml, lemmygrad.ml, hexbear.net, or even lemmy.world itself? You'd be very very wrong in that assumption.
Aaaand we are back where we started. What is "hosting"? Your lemmy "home", lemmy.today for me, has a cached copy of all the content it's users view. So if I retrieve illegal material my instance has it too and while it's hidden it IS retrievable by both the Instance Operator and other users (if they know how).
So whose door(s) are the cops kicking down in the raid? Mine? Lemmy.Worlds? The one at exploding heads / lemmynsfw / db0zer? All of them?
3rd parties are not new. All these issues came up when Google, YouTube, etc started storing third party content. They still exist today because they followed the rules.
What? No, my point is that if you are American and host an instance, you'll probably be ok. Just like Google and YouTube.
If you are not American and host an instance, then all bets are off. If you are Swiss, then you are probably ok. If you are North Korean, then maybe the police are coming for you right now.
In the US, if you have copyrighted content on your server and the copyright holder says "Get rid of it", then you have to get rid of it. As long as you comply, you'll be ok. That's literally YouTube's business model.
If you refuse, then the cops might come for you. In the US, cops don't go after users who download copyrighted content, only those who make it available to others.
Exactly, users and hosts are subject to laws around using and hosting in their own jurisdiction. Instances caching posts are hosts.