Right, but that’s not really fair to the node operator because they have no recourse except shut the node down and loose their investment or continue to allow damages and have the data center shut them down, and possibly have to pay some legal fine.
If the vote is after an appeal from the canister operator while it is in suspension, than the canister operator can just make the appeal that this was not right for whatever reason, and the community can take time to deliberate on that and allow them to continue on or not. Node operators could then choose to move the node elsewhere, if the community still wants it up and the node operator thinks it’s going to be a problem.
One thing is for sure, the verification process will need its own dept, that’s gonna be some work. The terms would have to be clearly defined, although in the end the NNS will have the final say during appeal.
Getting closer! Personally I’m comfortable with no vote before legitimacy review (and possible suspension), as long as those actions are clearly logged and publicly available and based on the terms of service. This way we don’t have to moderate 1000s of complaints, but can still review what happened, and the reason for the decisions. Then for the grey area situations, if the canister owner does not agree they could choose to appeal where the NNS would deliberate.
This would also avoid embarrassment to a canister owner if one of their users is causing problems. They wouldn’t need to go back to the NNS every time looking like an fool, they could simply resolve the offending file, and be reinstated without having to go to a vote. Maybe if this happens more than 10 times in a month or something then a vote is triggered for more serious consequences. I suppose that is not a process on this diagram yet lol
Yeah… that does make this process difficult doesn’t it. I mean it could work with only notification and then deletion, but I just think it’s heavy handed for most cases. If the notification time was too long, the node operators are still being left out to dry, so we are left with a shorter time to deletion, and everyone having to vote on every complaint because the penalty is so extreme.
Imagine you went on a 2 week holiday and came back to having your entire business being removed from the universe, with no recovery. There has to be a better way.
This is an approach that was discussed in the Discord call recognizing that node operators wish to take immediate action and addresses the impact on node operator rewards. The removal of a canister becomes less pressing and maybe unnecessary.
Ok very interesting approach… but like assess business risk, does that mean that if Bob doesn’t have enough money to mount a full legal defence to take on dFinity because he is a solo guitar artist living day to day, but is getting his IP infringed. Does that mean, the network doesn’t care? Or the responsibility in that case falls on the canister owner, who we would hope would care but may not in certain cases.
At a minimum, I would like to see an open and transparent logging system for the ‘assess business risk’ so that these situations are not pushed under the rug. At least then in that case, he could point to a wrong doing, and perhaps we could create an easy to navigate public document explaining how to register valid complaints, in light of not having enough money to hire Alan Dershowitz. Maybe this would require getting an II login, to stop exploitation by bots.
The canister owner should be notified off the bat so they can apply for self-removal of the offending content asap (maybe its just a file not the whole canister) before being wiped off of the galaxy. I like that this diagram takes into account extreme situations (like child exploitation etc) where it would not matter if the canister objects to removal, the entire canister needs to go … The only problem is, the vote would take 4 days, but it is a heavy penalty that shouldn’t be taken lightly. Hrmmm I still feel there should be terms of service with high bar extreme cases that need to go asap but that is my opinion
The compensation thing would have to be vetted by a legal expert, that’s above my pay grade but I like the idea of putting a built-in incentive on removing illegal content. Obviously this entire thing would have to be vetted by legal experts, which I am not.
Note: This is a response to @dostro’s initial post and not the other responses in the thread.
If you’re really going to go this route, then wouldn’t the “secure” way to do it be requiring the complaining party to obtain a judgement as the proper criteria for a violation?
When DFINITY thinks it’s a wise idea to play the judge and jury regarding what constitutes a legitimate DCMA notice vs. a frivolous request, then it increases the incentive to just create frivolous requests.
From the way Foundation members are talking, it’s very much starting to seem like the governance system of DFINITY is shaping up to be “innocent until proven guilty”, in many cases.
Your choice to take that stance, and I respect it – it’s just going to evaporate the stated value proposition of the Internet Computer to smithereens.
If this is a general template for legal rigor required to declare a Canister “in violation”, then in the event that all of these ERC20’s are declared to be unregistered securities (and then appeals and court cases start flying back and forth) after the Foundation puts so many resources in to pull off the ETH integration, you’re going to see where imprecisions in the takedown standards blow up very hard…
If you’re placing the “legitimacy review” process above the courts, which you are doing in advocating a process where there is no requirement of a formal judgment against the offending party for a complaint to be declared legitimate, and declaring that the network should have the authority to effectively give what is a legal opinion on a legal complaint, then you’re effectively declaring the network to be above the court system in the first place.
As a practical matter, you don’t think that some major lawsuits are going to start flying against DFINITY if an entity has a business Canister removed for (example) a DMCA notice, then challenges that notice in court and is found to be not in violation? Especially when Dominic has made (again) repeated public statements suggesting that the Canisters are “unstoppable” on a “censorship resistant” network?
Most of these proposals work out to be super whacky on a variety of fronts when push comes to shove – @Manu and similar free market approaches make the most sense.
A note to the mathematicians and engineers in here that keep engaging in this fallacy of abstraction, life ain’t a damn toy model. It has dynamics.
I like the idea of making Nintendo participate in the network to enact content moderation and this could actually turn to be a huge incentive for adoption as you mention, but for this to be taken seriously wouldn’t you need to eliminate liable agents (perhaps as @lastmjs has been suggesting for node operators)? Otherwise what keeps Nintendo from just pursuing either the node operator or Dfinity legally instead of playing the on-chain governance game?
They’d never do it, not only cause DMCA are spammed by legal teams with no tech background other than sending emails but also cause to enforce their will they should buy millions worth of ICP so they’d rather take it to court.
The idea is precisely to make it impossible for them to bring it to court, the same way it’s impossible to bring a BTC miner to court… their only alternative would be to attempt an nns proposal and hope the community sides with them.
When a miner processes a transaction he only knows address x wants to send some btc to address y, once its confirmed he can’t revert it, so even if somehow law enforcement finds out that transaction was linked to illegal activities the miner can’t possibly revert the state of the whole blockchain, on the other hand nodes have 2 choices: remove the content somehow or be shut down.
Even if in the future miners are taken in court they would have methods to prevent that such as hiding behind a VPN or TOR, the fact you can run a miner at your home also helps, depending on the country DMCA claims to private IPs are useless, e.g you can seed torrent easily using your home connection, try doing the same on a dedicated server hosted in a 1st world country and you’ll get shut down in a couple weeks. IC nodes are hosted in the most regulated infrastructure there is for this kind of stuff and while it is an advantage cause it grants fast and reliable connections and consistent uptime it also mean they can be kicked from the data center anytime they are seen as a liability.
In the past days there have been discussions to add canisters reshuffling and other safety measures to ensure nodes aren’t liable for the content they host, but those are long term goals and it also seems they could cause governments to ban IC from what I’ve read.
The current situation is less than ideal and I think I already have an idea of what the foundation will have to do: comply with DMCA to preserve the IC’s future.
The IC is not mature and adopted enough to be a full web 3.0 infrastructure that only complies with the community’s decisions, just like Satoshi was worried about BTC being used on Silk Road, Dfinity is worried about CP and DMCAs cause they could ruin the IC’s reputation and possibly result in bans in some countries, which would kill adoption and the dream of a blockchain singularity.
Its a shame cause I envisioned web 3.0 to be better in all aspects than web 2.0, but right now I have a feeling it will only be different, yes there will be some additions like SocialFi, added security and some controversial sites like “Parler” will be able to exist, but at the same time we might lose illegal streaming sites, some of you might be okay with this, but for me it is a huge loss, illegal streaming has tangibly improved the way we consume media, its only thanks to Torrent and similar services if today we have Netflix, Spotify, etc… for a small monthly fee, if web 3.0 means the entertainement industry will be able to reinstate their anti consumer monopoly then I’m not sure I want it as much as I did.
I’m okay with the IC being banned out of fear initially though, the point of revolutionary technology is that banning it or going against it ends up being inefficient and counter-productive, because it’s the inevitable next step, and it must challenge obsolete, inefficient systems. I’m kind of demoralized at how detached many of the people involved in the project seem to be from this value, and the spirit of crypto in general tbh. The tech is still amazing and the devs definitely deserve the recognition for it. But I agree, it seems it could end up being a lot different than I thought.
I don’t think people are reacting because they are detached. I think it is an appreciation of the perilous position a node operator is left in with zero legal cover. The technology is evolving. It is just not there yet, but the DMCA litigation, notifications and legal teams are. Unfortunate, but it is what it is.
Dude I’m talking about “internationally” accepted illegal activity…IP theft, terrorism, and child exploitation…and possibly malicious canisters that seek to harm the IC…
The point here is that the community need to draw that line and implement a solution to deal with it.
I think what were talking about here is handling certain pre-court requests, so that we can take care of some obvious issues internally (self-govern) before they are forced to bring more un-nessasary heat and clog up the OG court system. I understand that would bring some risk, but that’s what a responsible system should do IMO, and everything should be documented so the process could be perfected. We’re just spitballing the best actual way that might actually work, but yeah it’s not easy, and there’s no way everyone will be happy. If there was an actual court order, I’m not sure what a vote would be about. It needs to come down, or the nodes will go down.
It would be great to have some clear direction on this from top top, so that I can decide if I actually want to dev a larger project on this platform. Once I deploy the app, my reputation is on the line as well, even if it’s another canisters fault. It’s fine for experimental projects with no users but if you were actually going to go for it, it feels like you could get caught in a trap rn to me anyways. Just like the node operators are feeling currently.
In the DMCA thread, I posted a process model to ensure the node operators maintain their reward in the event of a takedown order and elect to takedown the node - without a canister removal. If the takedown notice goes to the node operator, does anyone know what legal basis would be for the NNS to take action to remove content if they are not a party to the request. Good hygene? How does liability unfold? What is the Foundations exposure in all of this? Is the foundation going to advance a legal opinion and share with the community? A few questions.
