hwagoolio

FYI, just so you're aware -- everything that you say in an official capacity as a representative of LemmyNSFW can be used against you as evidence in court.

Consequently, you can't say: "We do not aim to just have stolen copyrighted content on the site"

As that indicates that your website intends to permit (some) copyright infringing content.

You're basically forced to communicate: "We do not permit stolen copyrighted content" (irregardless of how tightly or loosely you privately intend to moderate the content). Alternatively, you should add a disclaimer to your posts that "these views/messages do not represent an official stance of LemmyNSFW and is a personal/individual statement" (something like that).

tldr: Just be very careful of what you say, especially as the content in these discussion threads are easily saved across fediverse instances, and people can always dig up your past statements if something ever goes to court.

Speaking to a lawyer is prudent and I think it's within your best interests to do so.

This is jurisdiction-dependent. While I'm not familiar with Ukraine's platform versus publisher laws, Section 230 is US law and applies to US hosts and American citizens. I would suggest that you review this with lawyers familiar with the law of the country that @yay (the server owner) resides in and the country that you are hosting in.

As far as I understand, CSAM (for American services/hosts) is also similarly covered under Section 230. Twitter/Reddit/Google isn't liable for CSAM found on their platform so long as they act promptly to remove it as soon as it is reported.

Personally, I would be a little more concerned than you are regarding copyright, if only because I've spent a lot of time in the fan-translation space. Websites that host >90% pirated content (e.g. manga aggregator websites) are much more vulnerable to prosecution under copyright law than a website like reddit, who can argue that they aren't a piracy website because a minority of their content is infringing copyright and most of it is OC.

Thank you for describing the operations in greater detail.

“Biased against hentai” is a bit unfair - “inexperienced, concerned, and unsure” is better. I mean, look at this wikipedia page, it’s enormous and there’s so much distinction between countries. Basically we need to enforce different rules for different geographies, and this is a legal and technical nightmare.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but frankly it seems to me that your team is cherry picking the laws that you want to enforce.

In reality, >90% of the content here likely violates copyright law and/or privacy law and is illegal in a large swath of jurisdictions. Every year, there are hundreds of people arrested or sued for those crimes, whereas there is no precedent for arrests on fictional bestiality/noncon/dubcon (as far as I am aware). If your team is concerned about legality, I strongly recommend that you review those portions of the law rather than pursuing a unicorn chase on fictional/artistic depictions of content.

Many websites have a critical line in their Terms of Service that users must own the copyright or permission/license from the copyright owners to upload content. Although this is widely disregarded by users on many websites (e.g. Youtube, reddit, twitter), this rule is essential for for the hosting platform lest they be chewed apart by legal authorities. In fact, the entire principal behind a DMCA takedown request is that the party that files it claims that the user who uploaded content does not own the copyright (which should be against the platform's TOS to begin with).

The legal implication of this is that no content except OC is technically kosher on lemmynsfw.

By choosing to ignore the law with respect to copyright yet aggressively interpret the law respect to fictional depictions of bestiality/dubcon/etc, it appears to me (and I suppose many users) that the admins are eager to ban hentai communities whereas they are reluctant to ban IRL porn communities (many of which also host illegal content).

Keep in mind that many countries also have obscenity laws -- although many of these laws are not effectively enforced in many Western countries. Do note that these obscenity laws can be interpreted very loosely, and the UK has taken people to court for "extreme" sex acts such as (consensual) fisting or urethral sounding (although in most cases as far as I'm aware the accused was found not guilty).

Lastly, regarding the variety of laws between countries -- the only laws that are effectively relevant is (A) the country the (server) owner resides in and (B) the country the servers are located in. It doesn't matter if pornography is banned in Iran or Ukraine. Assuming that the server owner and the server itself isn't located there, Iran has no ability to summon an American citizen overseas to Iranian court. I would, however, advise the porn-distributing American citizen against traveling to Iran, because if they are physically in Iran, there's always the risk they may be arrested there.

I heard on the grapevine that the server is located in Ukraine though -- so perhaps it would be prudent to changes providers on that bullet point.

Thank you! Appreciate the responsivity.

I really appreciate the transparency here. Thank you!

Do you think you could give us some insight on the administrative operations? Is gavi or yay or Mikey the “head” admin and ultimately they’re the one making the decisions?

Or is it more of a council that votes on policy? If so, what is the quorum needed? How many admins are actually active? Who are the 14 admins that aren’t listed on the lemmynsfw sidebar (secret admins)? How is the admin team expanding and how is the team deciding who to invite into that executive team? How can users feel confident that admins are diverse and representing their interests versus a specific interest group?

One of the impressions I’ve gotten is that the admin team is especially biased against hentai, and the hentai-related admins all appear to be inactive.

Great! Glad to hear that.

I believe I saw in the other post that the admin team was planning on moving to a Russian server. Is this true?

Given current circumstances in the world, I would like to know if the server fees paid are going to the Russian government (via taxes) and thereby supporting an ongoing conflict.

The main unknown variable for me is just the question of how much the NSA is watching us, how much data they've collected, and how much they've chosen not to act on.

Their matrix is here (open to public): https://matrix.to/#/#lemmynsfw:matrix.org

If there are thumbnails, lemmy would still be hosting the thumbnails on their own server, which doesn't solve all the legal issues.

I've been in the fan translation community for many years, and we paid a lot of attention when a bunch of Chinese scanalators were arrested while traveling in Japan for tourism.

Apparently, the JP government id'd them and arrested them out of the blue for stuff they did online.

It does happen -- and consequently since I've done a bit of fan translation myself, it's one thing on my mind if I ever decide I want to travel to Japan.

While this is technically true, I wouldn't give this as advice to someone who isn't experienced with covering their tracks on the internet (e.g. buying with bitcoin) or doesn't know which provider is less likely to share their information with authorities.

There are quite a few cases of people getting arrested for carrying around physical copies of loli/shota (or on a USB stick) in certain countries (e.g. US tourist in Canada), that for me I would be paranoid about it, especially if I was traveling.