this post was submitted on 05 Jun 2025
470 points (98.4% liked)
Technology
70918 readers
6011 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related news or articles.
- Be excellent to each other!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, this includes using AI responses and summaries. To ask if your bot can be added please contact a mod.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
- Accounts 7 days and younger will have their posts automatically removed.
Approved Bots
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
No. I am not aware of any law that makes you liable by holding or claiming the copyright to some content. EG you may have to pay damages for libel, but not because you have copyright to the libelous statement.
Doesn't quite make sense.
You're telling me that someone can get popped for mistakenly visiting the dark side of the internet and having whatever-the-fuck horrible shit put on their machine, but owning the content and hosting it on your servers results in nothing?
Not quite.
Generally, sites aren't liable for user generated content as long as they follow some rules. They need to take down illegal content and provide some way of reporting such content. In the US, that's the whole DMCA takedown thing. The whole content ID thing, that YouTube does, might not be strictly necessary, but it was rolled out in response to a high-stakes lawsuit. The EU is, as always, more strict in these matters.
People are not punished for things beyond their control (but mind that a fine is not the same as damages). If you are sent illegal content, that you have not requested, you shouldn't expect formal punishment, though the investigation may be punishing in itself. If you simply don't know how caching works, you're probably in trouble.
But this was about copyright. I don't think you get punished anywhere for holding some copyright. Say some Japanese Manga artist travels to some European state where some of their works are illegal. They're not going to get arrested for that. Anyone who brings such illegal works into the country will not be so lucky, regardless of copyright.
Copyright law is messy. Thank you for the elaboration.