What is the Witness Legal Liability For Copyright Infringement & Other Online Rules? Dtube?
It is clear that anyone engaging in distribution of digital media and text online faces numerous forms of legislation from the alleged governments that attempts to enforce copyright and others doctrines onto them. The long tale of Bit Torrent sites being targetted, blocked and shut down by governments is a part of the history here, but how does this effect Steemit?
Months ago I made a post questioning the copyright situation for DTube and speculated that a failure to take some kind of action to stop mass uploading of copyrighted materials could pose a serious threat to DTube and possibly also Steem. It appears that with the continued rise of @DTube, this spectre is becoming ever more relevant and as far as I am aware, there is no public plan in place to handle this currently.
The recent piece on Polygon, featuring DTube and @ned tries to frame Dtube as being a kind of 'Youtube for Conspiracy Theorists' - which just isn't true at all and goes some way to revealing the agenda of the author. In any case though, it is clear that many users are using DTube (and Steemit) because they have been censored and controlled on other networks and they like the freedom here. There's nothing wrong with that, freedom is a good thing. The problem though is that:
With great power comes great responsibility
We all enjoy the freedom here and for the moment there is no great move to control the social experiment that is Steem, however, I do feel there is a kind of bravado involved among many who think they are untouchable because.... public blockchain. But that's not actually the reality. If a Domain is used to carry out operations that are claimed to breach legislation, then the domain can be seized and I think so too can the hardware and software involved - at least in some regions of the world (including USA). While it is true that the open source nature of Steem means that it would be really very hard to totally stop it's use on the web, it IS possible for state actors to attempt to shut down the blockchain simply by targetting the humans involved.
DISCLAIMER: This is not legal advice, I am not a professionally trained legal adviser, if you want legal advise I suggest seeking someone who is a professional in the relevant field of Law for your jurisdiction.
Copyright implications for Witnesses
This hadn't occurred to me until just now and I have never seen anyone else even mention it. If I or anyone runs a witness server or a complete Node for the Steem blockchain, Am I essentially operating a form of digital distribution that amounts to being responsible for breaches of copyright that may occur within the posts being processed by the server?
The Witness servers are technically processing data that could be copyrighted and thus could be said to be 'breaking the law' in some senses and thus the operators of the servers could potentially be hassled as a result.
Furthermore, the new EU legislation for online privacy (GDRP) which comes into effect in May, has an elaborate new set of requirements for 'data processors' who may be involved with operating systems that process information that could be used to identify individuals. I have see no mention of this being relevant to anyone here yet.
I don't know all of the answers to these issues and I think that there is a chance that no-one will really know the answers for sure unless there is a challenge made of some kind and the details are fought over in a court case for some reason.
I am in the process of researching GDRP in the course of my professional activities and so will know more about it in the coming weeks.
Does anyone have any good references for this topic in regards to Steem and Steemit?
It would be great if @ned or someone else at Steemit Inc. would point me to a legal statement regarding these issues. Maybe @andrarchy can help?
What do you think?
Wishing you well,
Ura Soul
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Hello,
I too see these problems incoming. I tried to talk to the DTube-Creator about this, but it looked like he wasn't very interested.
Copyrighted material on D.Tube is surely a problem, but it is the least problem. If a movie has been uploaded to D.Tube it is D.Tube against the Owner. That's a slow burner and, as we all learned from Piratebay, they will get you in the end.
Far greater problems arise when somebody uploads "CP" or Nazi-Stuff. Then it is D.Tube against the State. In D.Tubes case it would be the State of France or the EU, since the creator of D.Tube is located in France. And they don't pussy around when it comes to Nazi-Stuff. They are equally tight as the Germans when it comes to the topic.
A solution should be easy. He needs to implement a blacklist of hashes which will not be displayed. I know it is against the censorship-thinking... But as long as D.Tube operates under french law, he has to obey it.
This is also a problem for Steemians who operate their own IPFS-Node. They should configure it in a way, that the node only host their own files.
An even bigger problem will be if someone posts CP or Nazi-Stuff in text form. Because it would be saved in the blockchain. In that case every witness has a problem. At least every Witness located in the EU and USA. Because every Witness would distribute that stuff.
The Problems arising the new EU-Data Protection Law is hard to grasp at this moment. The law is clear that if personal data is stored in a blockchain, it has to be deleted (after some time). So the question is, are there any personal data structures saved in the blockchain?
If not.... is not hard to write some personal data, like an adress to the blockchain. Now, the blockchain would be in violation of the new data protection law. At least in the EU.
Its not easy. But it sure will be interesting.
Greetings from Germany,
Andy
I have not seen that yet, but there is a lot of documentation and I don't have much time to read it. Do you have a link to more info on that?
There is no way to delete data in the blockchain currently after the 7 day period, so a hard fork would be required to comply with that.
My understanding of the privacy laws is that they only apply if the data can be used WITHIN THE SCOPE of the system to identify a user. So for example, if a user creates a username it is not inherently able to be used to identify them. An exchange, on the other hand, may then be able to reasonably use that username to identify the user's 'legal' identity, but that exchange is not an operator of the blockchain (Witness). It's a complex topic with many factors, but I think that's correct at present.
There are numerous twists and turns in the legislation and it is my current understanding (not based on any legal advice or deep research) that if you do not intend or need to hold specific data that identifies someone and they then provide it anyway in a free text field, there's nothing you can really do about that and so you can't specify it in a data audit. However the 'right to be forgotten' needs to be accounted for, which theoretically does indeed mean that posts must be able to be deleted from the blockchain. What a mess!
Here is the link regarding private data in the blockchain.
One example: The EU considers even the saving of your IP as private data that you are not allowed to store. I don't know if the IP is saved within the blockchain, but that is the problem. We don't know what the EU will mark as private data.
You are right, that only a hard fork would make it possible to delete certain data. But if thats what it is going to take... they will make us do it.
I don't know if the "right to be forgotten" applies to us. When I remember it correctly, the right to be forgotten only applies to search-engines like google and bing. the "to be forgotten"-informations are still online on the original websites. Just Google was commanded not to list these. But the information itself was not illegal.
I will create a better example and get back to you.
Greetings,
Andy
thanks, i'm a bit too tired to go into this in depth, but i'm not currently sure i see the benefit of hashing to blockchains - if the data cannot be retrieved, but only validated - it would surely only have limited use, unless i am missing the point - which is entirely possible!
I did specifically ask the UK Information Commissioner's Office whether storing an IP address was classed as private data in the context of the GDRP and she stated that she could not say but pointed me to some sites. After researching a while and speaking to more people it was explained that the data is only considered to be covered by the GDRP if it can identify someone within the scope of the system. So if the data can be used outside of the system to identify someone but not inside the system, then it is not covered by GDRP. So, for example, if you have an IP address then that would not necessarily be able to be to identify a person since we do not have the ability to look up all IPs and associate them with people.
Further, the GDRP does not say that storing such data is forbidden, it simply says that the organisation controlling the data has to register with the relevant government body and take steps to audit and protect the data. If a person consents to their data being made public then there is nothing to protect.
As far as I am aware, the 'right to be forgotten' is the same right that is referred to in the webpage you linked to regarding data deletion.
It's very tough to get to the bottom of all of this since all resources I have seen point back to EU legal documents that are both huge and written in legalise.
I created an example over at my blog
Please check if you can recreate it. Otherwise I would make a video as a demonstration
Funny, I wrote a post on this 3 months ago comparing DTube to YouTube and copyright considerations for uploaders. I found an account with at least 98 Movies on it that are clearly Hollywood productions and if the big movie houses like Sony, Warner Brothers and such decide to come after their rights, it could get interesting. Unlike me, who will file a DMCA take down notice, those big boys don't screw around. They'll wait until the money potential exceeds the cost of a legal team and move in for the kill.
A quote from my post: "Another thing to be aware of is copyright issues; always upload your own material, properly credit anything you use under "fair use" provisions, and get permission to publish anything recorded at privately owned venues"
Hardly anyone read my post of course. I decided that for every exclusive DTube upload, I'd still keep an unlisted or private copy on YouTube, ..just in case. That way I also know right away if there are copyright claims, correct or incorrect, against my work.
Typically, yes - it remains to be seen whether witnesses could be held liable, for example - I certainly don't feel like being the test case! However, I think those with the most money would be the main targets - aka, the top 19.
I'm no expert, but from what I understand is that the servers are more or less synchronized mirrors (please correct me if I'm wrong). From what I read in the past of copyright cases in the US; the authorities don't care if copyrighted material is hosted on the same server as other material; they'll take the whole server regardless of whatever else is on it. Bummer if your collection of family photos is there too. They're gone!
For most of my music videos, I have written permission to publish. A lot of extra work, but well worth it when I get an unjust copyright claim on YT. I never had a strike.
Hmm, uploading heavily copyrighted material could grow into a problem but I do have a bit different position on copyright in general (although I make my living by copyright laws...)
From my perspective, it is fine to upload obscure works which aren't monetized in other way and are in danger of falling into obscurity or even disappearing altogether. I do upload material that is not my own, but when I feel it would be fair use for educational purposes and that no money is taken from the actual authors/owners. Morally, I have no problem with it.
Remember old abandonware site abandonia? It was the place (and still is) which existed way before Good Old Games, dedicated to preserving old computer games and saving them from oblivion. They offered, and still do, old games with no copyright claims for free. Well, without them and their work Good Old Games would have never come to be and the authors of those old games would have never gotten their second lease of life they now enjoy.
And another thing, I truly believe that no one has the right to "bunker" anything that has once been made publicly available. And especially not without a very very good reason. And simply forgetting about it in a pile of copyrighted material you accidentally acquired through corporate purchase is not a good reason. If there is an obscure documentary masterpiece whose current owner has forgotten it even exists... I will have no qualms uploading it. The work itself deserves it.
As for those who upload recent hollywood films or other people's original content... well they can rot in hell, on that we agree.
Setting the various edge cases for copyright aside, when it comes to the system we are using here, the worst case scenarios are the ones that must be addressed.
The makers of the hollywood movies are actually the ones i have less care for, but that's not the position of the courts!
Sure, but imho that is the nature of the game... I can't see how whatever trouble d.tube runs into could end up blamed on steem... and if they're smart they probably found a way to cover themselves. It would really make no sense, akin to fining a telephone company for fraudulent calls made over their lines. But on the other hand... nonsense seems to be the order of the day when dinosaurs encounter those pesky mammals nibbling on their eggs. :)
Exactly, reasonable responses are not their forté!
Without Steem, DTube does not exist - I think that is enough of a connection.
The telephone companies are forced to comply behind the scenes with various intrusions into their liberty in order to prevent fraudulent calls. If we take that as the example it would mean Witnesses and Steem being forced to not accept Dtube posts into the blocks.
My answer is no and here's why:
On one hand, witnesses can't be individually held accountable for the entirety of the blockchain nor are witnesses responsible for the fact that a post editing (unarchiving) function isn't coded in. It would first seem that each witness can only assume a very small part of responsibility.
Now let's keep a few things in mind: The frontends can be hardcoded to blacklist/hide all noted content that falls under copyright infringement. There were a few days when a popular profile didn't pull up on Steemit, for example. What do the frontends do? They filter the information from the blockchain and distribute it. They are thus the distributors of it, not the witness servers. The witness servers are the storage.
The first step to dealing with copyright and other questionable content is sending and receiving a Cease & Desist notice. That's not the end of the world. You then have time to respond and they have time to figure out if they're going to follow up with legal action or not. The recipient would be Steemit, Busy or whichever frontend. Likely Steemit. At times, it will be the individual offender, if said offender can be identified. The witnesses don't even register on that sort of radar.
Witnesses are here to provide a purely-technical service. They process blocks that are full of various forms of contents. They have no way of filtering what content they process and what content they reject. They don't have the ability to reject. I can't say "I'll set my parameters to only process blocks to do with account registration and to reject blocks with all follows and unfollows". That's impossible. Witnesses also have zero control over who is granted accounts, what content is uploadable, etc. They vote on hardforks and major changes to the blockchain, they set price feeds, but they don't have a way to filter or police the blockchain.
And finally, witnesses offer their service in good faith, having taken all reasonable precautions that compromises they can control, such as poor service due to hacking of server, does not occur. For these reasons, going after a witness or all witnesses (providing they can be gathered) in a court of law is a colossal waste of time and no reasonable persecutor or lawyer will ever follow through on.
The blockchain is accessible with or without a UI being involved and so regardless of what the various websites do, the nodes still serve the content completely independently, so there is no escaping that. There can be no websites without the node servers.
The fact that server operators do not have the ability to filter the content does not mean that as a server of that content the operator is absolved of all responsibility.
That would fall under ease of access. If you put a pool in your yard and don't fence it in, kids can fall into it. If you fence it in, then you've taken reasonable precautions and kids would have to go out of their way to fall in. Same here. Someone would have to go off the beaten path to access the blockchain without a front end. Witnesses are doing whatever they can to secure their servers. Kinda how the recent phishing attacks are not the fault of the witnesses. If the frontends eliminated hyperlinks from connecting, for example, no one would click on the phishing links without using secondary methods to reach said links. (Not to say that they should do that.)
I'm not really sure what you are saying here. If a court decides that copyrighted material is being served by the Steem network and that they want it closed, I don't see what difference it makes if 'the average person' doesn't know the IP address of the Steem nodes. I am not really suggesting that the average person would use the nodes directly - the point is that if they are trying to shut down websites that serve steem content, then it is pretty obvious that part of that would be going to the root source of the data or at least trying to block it.
It doesn't matter if you put a fence around something that is designated as illegal, it's still called 'illegal'.
I'm honestly not trying to make a case against Steem here, I'm just speaking based on what I have seen occur with other services that got shut down and in some cases people put in jail. Pirate bay and others come to mind.
You wanted a discussion so here I am. I know you're not making a case. I mainly go from my experience having to deal with these requests. Kinda if I'm running a traditional social media page and need to take something off the site. It's still in my database and backups (due to redundancy) but it's off my site. Now that's in a centralized case. In a decentralized case, there's what, 400+ witnesses? They all have servers synced to various levels and there could be servers syncing and not broadcasting. It's not the avenue a prosecutor would take -- it's a waste of their time. Just like right now I'm trying to deal with the phishing domains. I know I can't get the site deleted so I'm going after the registrars, which is a lot more centralized than some site that can be hosted anywhere and mirrored ten times over.
When you attack your enemy you take the easiest route, not the hardest.
Except that some witnesses are known, can be traced and have made huge amounts of money from their actions - thus making them both an easy and profitable target.
Technically speaking, they made a huge amounts of digital items called 'tokens'. When they sell those otherwise worthless things they get a different type of equally-worthless digital 'tokens'. Should they trade those, then they get money. Steem Power isn't even a token actually.
I think the issue at hand isn't whether the witnesses are responsible but whether the services are complicit in copyright infringement by enabling the activity without taking any mitigating actions or discouraging it in any way.
In fact by doing so they victimize us, the witnesses, by allowing copyrighted content to flow onto the blockchain and onto our servers.
The 'assets' in the form of Steem have a value and that is why many of the witnesses do what they do. The tokens are not worthless as evidenced by their value on many exchanges. Surely, steem power cannot be traded, but steem power is just steem held in a specific way until it is released and made liquid.
This is less about what you or I think 'makes sense' and more about what lawyers can get away with based on case law. Numerous cases were launched against 'average people' for their use of Bittorrent and file sharing sites - even when they had just downloaded one mp3 file! Targetting server operators who can be said to be engaging in business practices, specifically renting a server for the purpose - who happen to also have maybe made $1 million USD in some cases - is a much more attractive target than one single mp3!
hey @ura-soul i havent idea about. thats some good info..
"freedom is a good thing. The problem though is that:
With great power comes great responsibility" You're right
cheers
don't think they can target the software, if the copyright is breached by the users I guess.. Definitely by the open source nature of the steemit, it cant be stopped on Web.
as with bittorrent, those who operate the software may be liable.
Seed and rpc nodes can be shut down.
Steemit Inc can be sued, as it is an usa(?) based company.
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Domains and seed/rpc nodes can be shut down, as they are public knowledge, so they place of operation is known. But how about witness nodes. Do we know their IPs?
Hmm.. Interesting..
Dtube is the best thing that has happened to us right now and I think we should all be careful and refrain from any act that will threaten the continual existence of this great discovery. The uploading of copyrighted works is an act that should be frowned at and although s unique feature of Dtube is limitless freedom, I would still suggest some level of control at least in this aspect
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