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Critical support for the Lemmy world peeps in their fight against pro-intellectual property nerds (hexbear.net)

submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[-] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

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.

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.

IRC the new loophole became encoding the link to what ever you wanted to copy, for example as base64.

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.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

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.

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.

Thank you for correcting me. It makes a lot more sense that you can't just encode something to make it legal.