A shroom community was removed from lemmy.world as it was considered “illegal” content by the admins. The logic behind this is boggling, to say the least.
Marijuana is considered an illegal substance in some states in the US and is still federally illegal. /c/trees should be banned, correct?
Clown pictures of Putin are absolutely considered illegal in Russia, so that should require and immediate ban.
Freedom of speech can also be considered illegal in some places.
Incest is considered illegal so that should automatically trigger a ban on all incest porn, real or not. Hell, porn is universally taboo, so that shouldn’t have any place on this instance, I guess.
You see where I am going with this? Rule 1 is a catch-all and needs clarification. Simply saying something is illegal is not quite enough. Owning and sharing pictures of shrooms is not illegal. Trading spores or mycelium is generally not illegal either.
This is not about me being salty (which I am) about the community being removed and forced to relocate. It’s the odd bias that was applied to justify its removal.
Please note that I said fix Rule 1, not remove it. There are some really bad things on the internet that shouldn’t use lemmy as a safe haven.
The question of legality on Lemmy is something that has to evolve and be discussed because of federation. Stuff on one instance gets replicated on others in other parts of the world. What factors should be the determining ones? The place where the instance is hosted? All the places where the content is replicated? Who is liable? The owner of the originating instance or all the instances that replicate illegal content? If this wasn’t free and open, but rather a huge corporation, the fediverse would have a legal team to decide already.
It’s almost like our made-up borders and laws are somehow at odds with the fact that, in almost all cases, anyone can access any information from any place these days, and that information is replicated and stored across the globe!
We need to assign a good name for this global system of interconnected networks. I admit, I am baffled as to what a good name should be.
Toobz
ianal, but I think the precedent is that if you own and serve illegal content then you are liable. I don’t think the law ever has or ever will entertain the idea that someone caught with cp on a hard drive and is serving it online shouldn’t be held liable. And frankly, I don’t think that’s something we should entertain either. If there’s an inherent legal/moral flaw in the system we should probably change the system before we ask the world to accommodate it. It sounds way too easy to spin up a scapegoat server, purchased anonymously on the other side of the planet, host very illegal content and pipe it through a ‘laundering’ server that you can openly own and operate with legal impunity. Sure, you’ll be caught hosting illegal content, but because it didn’t originate from your server you’ve done nothing wrong? I think the only way the legal questions will go away is if federated servers stop hosting the cached material from federated servers, or at least from the riskiest of servers. Right now the only way to do that is to de-federate but there should be another option.