User Generated Content and the Fediverse: A Legal Primer
www.eff.org
A growing number of people are experimenting with federated alternatives to social media like Mastodon, either by joining an “instance” hosted by someone else or creating their own instance by running the free, open-source software on a server they control. (See more about this movement and joining...

Two important notes: (1) This guide is focused on legal risks that flow from hosting other people’s content, under U.S. law. In general, the safe harbors and immunities discussed below will not protect you if you are directly infringing copyright or defaming someone. (2) Many of us at EFF are lawyers, but we are not YOUR lawyers. This guide is intended to offer a high-level overview of U.S. law and should not be taken as legal advice specific to your particular situation.

  • ObiniceEnglish
    14•9 months ago

    U.S. law doesn’t apply in most places, strange that they focused on that particular country for what is a global concern, but for those who are there, I imagine this is very helpful!

    • HildegardeEnglish
      34•9 months ago

      The EFF is an American non-profit, that’s their area of expertise.

      However, most of this article is about the DMCA. The DMCA is the US’s implementation of the World Intellectual Property Organization Copyright Treaty of 1996. A treaty which has been signed by 110 countries, all of which are required to pass their own version of the DMCA. Though some specifics may change, instances hosted in most countries will have to comply with the DMCA or very similar legislation.

    • Maestro
      10•9 months ago

      U.S. Law applies in a lot more places than just inside U.S. borders. If you host your instance on AWS or Digital Ocean, or protect it with Cloudflare, then you’re dealing with U.S. companies, and thus U.S. law. Even if you host in a EU region of AWS for example.

  • BlueÆtherEnglish
    7•9 months ago

    The law in New Zealand and Australia (where my .nz instance is hosted for now) are not very pomissive in the space of pron and espitally anything that looks remotely like CP (Henti et al). I have made the choice to defederate from any instance that promotes hosting porn. This is to [help] cover my ass. This extends to lemmynsfw, even though they are doing a good job of filtering their content. Active moderation is one thing that can save your ass (at least in NZ). If you are an instance owner you have to know the PORN/CP/etc statutes that you may run afoul of where you host.

    Please not that I have not made a HUGE song and dance about de-federating lemmynsfw’s content and I’m not demanding that the ban whole communities of subscribers.

    I think that us instance owners need better mod tools to police content that gets hosted on our instances. ie there is no easy way to check on any images that are uploaded to your instance.