this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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I'm surprised the major Lemmy servers even permit piracy related content in the first place. Half the Fediverse seems to be hosted in Germany, probably one of the worst countries to host piracy related content.
The .world team should definitely make a statement before banning stuff just to avoid this kind of drama, but piracy communities are not worth the moderation hassle and legal risk for a silly side project like Lemmy.
If I were you, I wouldn't expect the same privacy protections Reddit provides for their users when copyright owners start sending legal threats. These instances barely collect enough donations to cover server costs, nobody is going to pay an expensive lawyer to protect your IP address if your server gets sued.
Yeah people are really weird about this. They want a free distributed forum hosted by small admins, but don't want those individuals to take basic legal precautions? Piracy might be moral, but it's a liability which will absolutely impact the viability of servers in many places. Grow up.
The Lemmy instance doesn't actually host pirated content, does it? It's just information about pirated content and where to find it, right? Who the fuck cares about this
Links to pirated content have been deemed illegal in various jurisdictions. That said, the piracy community on Lemmy doesn't seem to do much more than complain about DRM, so I guess the risk shouldn't be that high?
Still, the best way to avoid annoying letters from lawyers is to avoid risky communities. Hosting anything related to piracy, gambling, porn, or crime is just a pain, even more so than hosting normal stuff.
I mean, it's not on their server. It's hosted on dbzer0.
Lemmy makes local copies of everything when federation occurs. It's 100% on their server. The only exceptions are images posted as part of the comments, those are loaded directly. Then again, that adds the ability to add tracking pixels, so that's not exactly great for a piracy community either.
Image loading example
I turned off all the logging for this proof of concept but this could've been a transparent PNG pixel that tracks every bit of information your browser will give it.
Oof, yeah that's bad...
Neat. Has anyone brought this up to the devs here or on github before?
I'm not sure, but anything doing Markdown parsing and allowing images to be embedded is vulnerable to this. I kind of doubt that the devs don't know about this.
The alternative would be to download every image on the server and cache it until users start requesting the image files, rewriting the Markdown to link to the new image location. I can think of a few reasons why that's not implemented.
Proxying all comments was implemented in the backend at some point, I'm not sure why this feature was removed again. I can't find much in the repo history, you could ask the devs why the feature got removed if you're curious.
you could safeguard against this on the client side by not loading images from untrusted sources. irc clients did this
Ayo what the fuck how'd you do that
Your client asks my server for the image, my server does a basic IP location lookup based on a free internet database I downloaded last year and turns it into an image on the fly.
Got the state correct 👍
i really wish there were a way to disable images with some of these fancy lemmy clients for android. I'm not interested in any of them
If you use Sync, there's this setting you can toggle to disable embedded images. I'm not sure if this protects against network requests, but I think it should? If you disable the, images are represented as links instead.
nice. yea it replaces your image with a link.
But of they federated they'll be hosting a copy.
I guess the question is: if you host a public forum, are you liable for things posted on it, or on separate but linked forums?
It doesn't matter if you don't have limitless money to pay lawyers
Since anyone can spin up a Lemmy server, at some point a rich person/persons will do so, which makes this a relevant question to ask.
Comments like this sound like the "they write it off on tax" comments, where there's this assumption about how complex things must work, but it can't work exactly that way otherwise we would see it happening all the time.
You might not have to pay damages. But you're probably going to have to pay a hefty legal fee not to pay damages.
Copyright laws are actually very difficult to enforce when it comes to digital piracy. You have to prove loss of profit among other things.
Then, who do you sue? The person downloading the product? The person hosting the product? The person providing a link to the hosted data? The person providing a platform for people to link things? The person who allows their platform to federate with another platform that does?
If we're talking about P2P sharing, then in a way no one is hosting the data.
In Australia when the Dallas Buyers Club case was being looked at, the studio was asking for a lot of money. Basically a big fat fine to be paid. The judge threw it out saying that the only reasonable damages for one person to pay would be the cost of the DVD because that was the value of the "theft".
You dont have to enforce it.
You just have to drown people in legal bills and force them into compliance with risk of bankruptcy.
I don't know enough about law to know how that does or does not work, but it that's possible then any entity with enough money can actively bankrupt anyone they want, and it won't have anything to do with why. If that's true could you not just sue someone by making stuff up and force them to prove you made it up?
Yup corrupt companies likely do it all the time. Technically it's perjury to lie in a court but outside of being caught or going to hell it's not much of a deterrent.
There isn't much recourse against that other than trying to skirt detection by these companies (not possible or feasible in the long term) or to be in a country that is strongly against or an enemy of the one(s) those companies are in or allied with.
thepiratebay.org is still up
they did go to prison tho
their apartment in Malmö looked and smelled like a triceratops hibernated in there, by the way
Ah yes, the pirate bay, the first stop for anyone wanting to download a file thats probably a virus.
Also they have lost lawsuits in the past and had fines levied against them and had property seized, so they arent as immune as you think.
I was thinking the same thing, as a legal question.
In the Fediverse, who's the source/target for the law to look at, the originator, or all the cached copies on other servers?
Edit: Basically, what this comment describes...
Yeah, we should run this shit through Somalia, they don't give a f u c k.