this post was submitted on 19 Mar 2024
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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...