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0 pointsNasrudith7y ago0 comments

Here is an analogy - imagine we crack down on theft at the source by massive fines for receiving stolen property. Sounds good? Try to sell anything secondhand then.

Nobody wants to engage in the secondhand market because of the massive liability. Sure you own it but can you prove it to their satisfaction? You could be lying and that is mo excuse on their part. You try to sell crafts you made yourself instead but nobody can be sure you didn't just steal them because you aren't a big name crafter. Big corporations can sell directly but small manufacturers and businesses are SOL. And worse yet this includes petitions and pamphlets too!

That is exactly what secondary liability does.

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anigbrowl7y ago

Except this isn't backed up by empirical evidence, in reality flea markets and used good stores are widespread despite the existence of laws against trafficking in stolen goods. Just because you can imagine a bad outcome doesn't mean it's inevitable or even probable.

NasrudithOP7y ago

You missed the point - those laws have limits to secondary liability based on knowledge precisely because of that! At worst they just need to return stolen goods even if they paid for them. I am pointing out how draconian and stupid the law is. A law with similar strictness would destroy secondary markets.

This law requires websites to /know/ the copyright to be covered. And that is an impossible task if no false negatives are accepted. Old usenet pirates would use base64 strings to spread contents and there are countless ways to obfuscate to algorithms while remaining human recognizable. Which means to remain safe one needs to not even accept and display text input from users.

Copyright databases would be of no help here given both automatic copyright and the ease of dodging hashes. And a complete set would be massive and hillariously defeat the point by giving any implenter all of the media in the world.

Given that it is inevitable that it will have a bad outcome. Even if it is left to rot on the books it becomes a tool of tyranny via selective enforcement.

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