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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • krayj@lemmy.worldtoLemmy.World Announcements@lemmy.worldRemoval of piracy communities
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    11 months ago

    True. And yet Cloudflare has to maintain its own army of lawyers to defend the constant barrage of lawsuits against Cloudflare claiming that they are facilitating copyright infringement. The average salary for 'Associate Legal Counsel" at companies like Cloudflare is about US $303,400. (source is Cloudflare themselves: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/employer/cloudflare-inc/associate-legal-counsel-salary )…and that’s just one of many. They are literally paying MILLIONS of US Dollars a year to defend against that. You think the admins for Lemmy.World have that kind of pocket change?

    Also, “caches” are temporary in nature and are different from permanent local copies (which is the model employed by lemmy). There is a technical difference, and even with that technical difference, Cloudflare still gets sued all the time for it.


  • It depends on the jurisdiction. In the United States, we have the DMCA which has been weaponized by content creators and publishers, but we also have a “safe harbors” provision to the DMCA that is supposed to protect online service providers from being liable for copyright infringement based on the actions of their users - as long as they meet certain provisions and restrictions and perform certain duties and dilligence. And yet even with that in place, it does not stop content providers from suing service providers and forcing those service providers to incur the pain and expense of mounting a legal defense.

    I am pretty sure that Lemmy.world admin team are European and that the instance is hosted somewhere in Europe, so they would have their own jurisdictional laws to follow.

    TL/DR: even if a service provider is technically protected from the actions of their users it is still subject to provisions and conditions, and that still doesn’t stop them from being sued and having to mount a defense. Some people just don’t feel the hassle of all that justifies the whatever benefits they’d gain from fighting that fight.

    Certainly you’ve heard of ‘The Pirate Bay’, who’s ‘users’ famously used their platform to share copyrighted materials…the founders of The Pirate Bay were arrested, tried, and convicted, and were forced to serve jail time. Turns out the “but it was our user’s doing it” defense wasn’t as reliable as everyone here seems to be suggesting.


  • You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works and either don’t know or don’t realize that content is replicated across instances that are federated with each other by virtue of users subscribing to it.

    If you are a lemmy.world user subscribed to a piracy community on another instance, then that content is replicated and hosted locally on lemmy.world also. You’ve never noticed how you can access content that originated on a foreign federated instance and still be able to access that content when the federated instance is down? That content physically resided on the lemmy.world instance until it was blocked.


  • This doesn’t invalidate my earlier statement that citizens are still subject to city ordinances.

    There are around 20,000 cities and municipalities in the United States, most of them have public-nudity/indecent-exposure laws.

    You successfully made the point that the legality of city ordinances can be challenged in higher courts (and even sometimes overturned) but the reality is that most people have neither the funding nor the time nor the expertise to take that up…which means ultimately you’re still subject to a city/municipality ordinances as well as state and federal.

    In 2017, Tagami v City of Chicago, the US Court of appeals for 7th Circuit ruled 2-1 that the city’s public nudity ordinance did not violate the complainant’s rights and upheld the lower court decisions (which meant that City of Chicago’s ordinance remained intact and validated as enforceable by the city).

    At the end of the day, yes you do have to be cognizant of the ordinances/codes of the city in question and cannot rely on State/Federal law alone.


  • TottalIy agree. i was not impressed with season 1 of Picard. I forced myself to watch season 2 and I almost just quit watching mid season - it just felt like they lost the magic. I wasn’t even going to watch season 3, but then I heard about all the cameos and thought it would be nice to see the old gang back together and it turned out to be the best season of the bunch. Still, Strange New Worlds is lightyears better, imo.




  • Putting a Netflix show on DVD and selling it is absolutely illegal unless they have a distribution license provided by the copyright holder.

    It would be legal after copyright expires (in the US, copyright exists for the lifespan of the author/creator + 70 years). Keep in mind that the US has stricter copyright laws than most of the rest of the world.

    For other items, like physical functional items, reproductions are generally legal unless the item is patented. And it would still not be legal for the reproduction to also reproduce any registered names or trademarks associated with the original. Example: you could legally reproduce and sell knockoff Nike Air Jordans as long as you didn’t use the Nike swoosh or any likenesses of the copyrighted artwork. For items that are patented, or patent pending - making and selling reproductions is illegal - and for most patented items the reproduction doesn’t even have to be identical for it to be infringing, just replicating the functionality is probably infringing.


  • It depends entirely on the jurisdiction. Take the city of Seattle, for example (I know this because I planned an executed a nude photo shoot in public view inside the city limits and sought legal council ahead of time to ensure I wan’t risking being charged with any crimes). The general rule for Seattle hinges on whether the activity is intended to tittilate or sexually arouse observers - and if that is obviously not the intent, then even full nudity is not illegal. Many other large cities have very similar ordinances.

    The smaller the town, and the more conservative the region, the stricter and less flexible the ordinances. There are beaches in South Carolina, for example, where they even regulate the minimum amount of coverage for bikinis and beachware.



  • First, votes aren’t exactly transparent, but they also aren’t completely private either. User voting records are stored in databases that instance owners have access to, so it’s possible for them to see (and/or even publish) up/down voting history. KBin already does this publicly. So I can see an argument being made that if the info is available to some people, it should be available to all people.

    Personally, I wouldn’t care if my upvotes and downvotes are exposed to the commenters/posters that I voted on, but I’m concerned about the possibility of it being used for discrimination. Imagine me following/participating in a community and then being immediately banned from that community solely because a community moderator didn’t like how I upvoted/downvoted on things. For example, say I want to participate in a philosophy or politic themed community and one of the mods there just happens to be very conservative and decides to exclude me just because I upvoted something that was NSFW once upon a time and they disapproved of that behavior? This will absolutely happen if all voting is public. On reddit, a similar form of discrimination happened by analyzing where people posted and they would be banned from certain subreddits just based on the other subreddits they have been active on- and even worse was that this was often done by a bot without regard for the actual comments made. I recall a very specific example of someone who used to hop into r/conservative to challenge or antagonize certain lines of thinking and they were banned from liberal/progressive subreddits because of their activity on r/conservative despite the fact that they were not sympathetic to anything on r/conservative. That same discrimination can (and probably does) happen on Lemmy already, but making voting history public will take it to the next level.

    If voting ever did become public on lemmy, then at a minimum users should be able to see/review/audit their voting history and be given the ability to retroactively delete some/all of it.

    You’re also ignoring the fact that it’s trivial to create/use alternate lemmy accounts. If voting records were public, it would just drive people to create multiple accounts from which to vote on things - to compartmentalize their interactions with different communities or users. Since this fact means that users would STILL be able to hide/mask their voting history, I think this is a good argument that it makes no logical sense to make voting records public.

    I think an ideal solution would be for users to just have a choice to make their voting public or to keep it private, or to selectively publicize or keep secret on a vote-by-vote bases.





  • If your chosen mobile app doesn’t offer the feature, then you can’t. Every app that does offer the feature does it differently, so it’s impossible for me to give you a single guidance that works on every mobile app.

    I assume you do have access to a web browser on mobile though, so open your web browser, navigate to the instance hosting the community and/or your own home instance, and then depending on the layout used by your device the modlog will be a clickable link in the sidebar to the right, or will appear as a link near the bottom of the page after scrolling to the bottom.



  • Yes, and even more chance of that happening today than 5 years ago. Reason: because of the modern day prevalence of the ‘fake reply’ SPAM and Phishing emails. Spammers and phishers are now drafting fresh messages mocked up to look like replies in existing email threads…older spam detection used to let these types of messages slip through because they thought they must be legitimate replies, and so naturally spammers started exploiting that to slip past detection. Modern detection no longer gives apparant replies a free pass.


  • I must be completely “dull witted” then. When I first started looking into lemmy, I went to the official “join-lemmy.org” website, clicked on “join a server” and picked one of the top listed recommended results. It just happened to be a VERY small and VERY new instance. But as a completely stupid dull witted new user who knew literally nothing about lemmy, I didn’t know any better.

    After joining that instance and looking for communities on it, I only saw the local communities plus a few non local communities from larger instances and I legit thought that’s all there was on lemmy. I mean, it was clear I was seeing the local ones, and it was clear I was seeing some nonlocal ones, who why tf would I expect that I wasn’t seeing everything?

    Your perspective is tainted by the fact that you know how it all works. People new to lemmy don’t, and I’m telling you that the onboarding and community discovery process is dogshit. I beg you to try considering things from the perspective of a newer user.


  • I tried mutualaidhub.org - and found another one that is about 45 miles from me so I went to their site to check it out. From what I can tell, it’s nothing more than a hyper-localized version of gofundme.com. It seems most of these things are just links to facebook groups. I don’t think these things are as organized or as helpful as your original post made them out to be.

    Also, for the record, I’m not actually looking for assistance. I’ve honestly never heard of this thing until your post and just am trying to learn more about them, what they do, who and how they help, and maybe find something I could contribute. These things do not seem like a very viable alternative to traditional social services.


  • That’s not exactly how it’s working in practice.

    Sure, for the top 5 lemmy instances, that’s kind of how it’s working. But for all other lemmy instances, when you load their communities and filter by “all” instead of by “local”, you are only seeing the communities that specific instance has become aware of (by virtue of that instance’s members manually subscribing to foreign communities on foreign instances).

    Since the very nature (by design) of lemmy is to be fragmented, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that users of most instances will never even become aware of that the most popular foreign communities are for the topics they are interested in, without resorting to 3rd party search tools and community trackers/locators.

    The very design of lemmy actually actively promotes fragmentation…fragmentation not just among the user base, but among communities of identical topics as well across different instances.

    The only way it would be ‘solved organically’ as you say, is when fragmentation is minimized by just having a few super-massive instances – but that seems to be counter to the fundamental ideals of lemmy itself.

    Personally, I think this is a huge usability problem that needs some better technical solutions.