There’s nothing to sue? They could go after an instance owner, sure, but I’m reasonably sure that there’s still Section 230 safe harbor protections for “service providers”, which to my knowledge could easily be the owner/admin of a fediverse instance. Perhaps it’ll need to be litigated in the courts, which is unfortunate for whoever gets stuck being the trailblazer.
Each instance owner is running these instances themselves, presumably out of the home, for free.
They could go after an instance owner, sure, but
There’s no “but”. They could fight a lawsuit, sure, but that’s time consuming and expensive, and why bother? The piracy isn’t coming from their instance, why should they have to fight a lawsuit for it? Piracy has its own instance, nothing has been defederated, they’re just not hosting the content on their server to save themselves the hassle down the road. I can’t imagine they’ll be the only one.
Sure, but doesn’t it suck that it doesn’t matter what the law says? Do you think it’ll ever change if everyone rolls over and isolates undesirable communities (think beyond piracy to other things like adult content, or content from marginalised groups)
Lawsuits don’t generally just throw themselves out. You have to pay a lawyer to show up and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on account of the fact that you don’t host the thing, or whatever the reason is.
Judges don’t go out and do research; if one side’s lawyer says Whirlybird runs The Pirate Bay out of their kitchen and the other side’s lawyer isn’t there, then the court is going to proceed as though that is at least plausible.
So many laws work like this too, it makes them worthless if personal wealth is required to get them enforced. If Section 230 only exists for the wealthy and corporations, the fediverse isn’t gonna get very far
You have to pay a lawyer to show up and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on account of the fact that you don’t host the thing, or whatever the reason is.
You don’t have to pay a lawyer, you can do it yourself.
There’s nothing to sue? They could go after an instance owner, sure, but I’m reasonably sure that there’s still Section 230 safe harbor protections for “service providers”, which to my knowledge could easily be the owner/admin of a fediverse instance. Perhaps it’ll need to be litigated in the courts, which is unfortunate for whoever gets stuck being the trailblazer.
Each instance owner is running these instances themselves, presumably out of the home, for free.
There’s no “but”. They could fight a lawsuit, sure, but that’s time consuming and expensive, and why bother? The piracy isn’t coming from their instance, why should they have to fight a lawsuit for it? Piracy has its own instance, nothing has been defederated, they’re just not hosting the content on their server to save themselves the hassle down the road. I can’t imagine they’ll be the only one.
Sure, but doesn’t it suck that it doesn’t matter what the law says? Do you think it’ll ever change if everyone rolls over and isolates undesirable communities (think beyond piracy to other things like adult content, or content from marginalised groups)
They won’t really have to fight a lawsuit because it would just be thrown out if a company tried to file one.
At worst they’d just get DMCA take down requests.
Lawsuits don’t generally just throw themselves out. You have to pay a lawyer to show up and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on account of the fact that you don’t host the thing, or whatever the reason is.
Judges don’t go out and do research; if one side’s lawyer says Whirlybird runs The Pirate Bay out of their kitchen and the other side’s lawyer isn’t there, then the court is going to proceed as though that is at least plausible.
So many laws work like this too, it makes them worthless if personal wealth is required to get them enforced. If Section 230 only exists for the wealthy and corporations, the fediverse isn’t gonna get very far
You don’t have to pay a lawyer, you can do it yourself.
True. But then you have to physically show up wherever, and know how to do it right.