Upcoming proposal and discussion on content moderation

Governance
62

It appears to me that some things are not possible for neuron holders to judge and enforce fairly. I personally would have no idea on how to judge the validity of the Nintendo claim. It seems the creator took it down but he could have easily decided not to.

We have a complex web of institutions that create and uphold our laws. We don’t just put everything to a vote to all citizens. We have politicians, lawyers, and judges, ie. experts. We have also have representative democracy.

Right now liquid democracy is simple and good enough as the Internet Computer is gaining traction. But I would imagine that for the IC to completely re-invent the internet and become a true global utility folks much smarter than me will need to think about how to rearchitect the governance system of the NNS to incorporate governments in takedowns of illegal activity. I just don’t think having neuron holders vote on these issues which they are totally unqualified for makes any sense at all.

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63

Which is why I would PAY to follow a neuron whose team has researched certain issues that are relevant to me as a United States Citizen residing in US (& of course other neurons in other jurisdictions)

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64

NNS should have the highest governance power of IC

65

One takeaway from this is that while Liquid Democracy tech could be the replacement for a legislature, it can’t be the replacement for a judiciary. In order to live up to its vision, the IC will need both, because Separation of Powers is a crucial principle in any working democracy.

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66

Damn wish they didn’t remove it…

Wanted to see where this was headed…

If they don’t want to host it, maybe email the source to one of us so we can host it and then blackhole the canister? Just kidding…

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67

“Some people just want to watch the world burn”

:wink:

68

Alexa’s prompt to the community, the consideration of an independent review board, this should now be discussed… will the IC be reactive, proactive, or dismissive of moral and ethical obligations?

The apparently insurmountable issue of different Nations’ Laws can be overcome by referencing the United Nations’ Charters, which Nations’ reference when updating their own Laws. Some Nations do it better than others, of course, but that shouldn’t be a sticking point for a new organisation looking for guiding principles.

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69

My opinion regarding the above is as follows:

The IC should be Proactive, funding an Independent Review Board (IRB) which has a remit to challenge content and inform relevant authorities, based upon findings weighed against the United Nations’ Charters. This would allow an IRB to act independently of authoritarian and corrupt governments, to hold the moral and ethical high ground when challenged.

Generally speaking, people who go down the crypto rabbit hole and stay believe this technology will empower everyone to become self sovereign.

Self sovereignty is a Right I can get behind, but not at the expense of others’ Liberty.

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70

I think the discussion is far from over. If you would like my PERSONAL opinion on this matter, I am available until 22:00 (CET). I can provide comments on my personal experiences of working behind the scenes at a node provider, and how this could influence a node provider (from MY perspective).

To clarify once again, I will NOT be speaking on behalf of (any) node provider(s).

You can find me either on Twitter or Discord.

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71

We are building an ethics committee to be a neuron operator within our SNS. Perhaps we will need a legal committee to do the same :thinking: But as you say, if the SNS is not in place, or unresponsive, the NNS may need to step in.

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72

A Mario game may seem trivial, but I 100% agree we should not rush this decision as it will set a precedent.

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74

Fully agree @lastmjs - its too early to make an informed judgement. I just voted ‘no’.

75

This was also suggested by Dominic in the 20 year roadmap article.

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76

The content is no longer on canister culg2-qyaaa-aaaai-qa7sa-cai. Because there is thus no reason to delete the canister, the foundation has voted reject on proposal 33379 to ensure that the canister will not get deleted. To me, the owner of the canister removing the content in question is the ideal outcome. Thank you u4u53-bhmqg-vc4mk-abm2u-mo6kz-jptpk-icn6i-gpkve-5b57m-m4cn5-jqe!

We are tremendously happy about the amount and quality of the interaction within the community on this, thanks everyone for participating! This is really great to see and, personally, made my day!

While the particular situation is now resolved, the problem of dealing with copyrighted materials as well as other types of problematic content still exists in principle. All of this needs to be further explored, discussed, and solutions to be found. The foundation is working on lessons learned from this and will propose solutions to the community, in particular in this forum, and continues to looks towards to the community for participation on ideas, solutions, and lively discussions and what are the best ways forward.

Thank you all!

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77

I agree that node operators should be shielded and not involved in any governance/decisions.

My question to you as a node operator. Do you have any control whatsoever over any canister hosted on your servers? I thought node operators have access (until enclaves are in place) to a canister state but not sure what exactly they’re able to see or do?

Would be interesting to know what kind of authority a node operator has.

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78

Personal opinion below. I work for DFINITY, but I do not have any authority to speak for them.

As I understand it, copyright holders need to consistently enforce their copyright if they want to enforce it at all. I.e. if Nintendo were to turn a blind eye to a canister hosting a game they own the copyright of, anyone in the future could point to that as proof that the copyright is not being enforced and be legally allowed to do the same.

I’m not a US citizen and not particularly familiar with US laws regarding copyright enforcement (such as the DMCA), but my understanding is that if a node operator does not respond to a takedown notice, the copyright owner can simply escalate to the data center (note that node providers are not actual data centers, just a couple of racks of servers in someone else’s datacenter) and ask them to essentially unplug said servers.

Meaning that if the NNS (or whatever judiciary is put in place alongside the NNS acting as legislature) decided to ignore a takedown notice, this would likely result in all nodes in the US getting unplugged one rack at a time over a period of a few weeks. Possibly in other US friendly countries too. All this with no need for costly legal action on the part of the copyright holder, but merely sending a handful of DMCA notices.

The canister controller taking down the respective canisters themselves is of course the ideal outcome, but this cannot be the expected outcome except in a very small number of cases. Meaning that we, as a community need to put something in place to deal with this type of issues all the while weighing.the possible consequences against the benefits.

I can sympathize with both sides of the argument (taking down illegal content; and censorship protection) and I definitely don’t have a solution for more gnarly cases (e.g., to pick a random example, marginal holocaust denial), but my personal opinion is that a clear cut copyright case is not worth the consequences. I am oftentimes the person who likes to see (a small corner of) the world burn, but in this particular case, I believe it would be exceedingly anticlimactic.

(To address one comment above: no, DFINITY doesn’t know the identity of canister controllers. And it also didn’t in this case. Someone somewhere (e.g. the exchange that sold them the ICP) might, but DFINITY is not privy to that information. In (not so) extreme cases, the canister controller might even come in the possession of ICP/cycles without ever having to divulge their identity to anyone. e.g. by getting an NFT drop and selling it.)

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79

I believe that you are referring to Trademarks disputes, whereas some expectation of enforcing your TM in the realm of your business exists. Copyright is “given” when the original work is created, and is valid until it expires, regardless of any attempts to enforce it or not.

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80

Regarding the technical aspects: node operators currently have no control over what canisters run on their nodes. So it may be exceedingly unfair to them to let them deal with the fallout. In the future, when secure enclaves / randomization / node replacement make it possible for a node operator to plausibly deny any wrongdoing, this may change, but for now it’s a pretty clear case of “canister X runs on node Y (among other nodes) belonging to node provider Z”.

Regarding how much time is available to respond to a takedown notice: while someone pointed out above that one legally has 7 days to respond, it is quite likely that the notice will be served to the data center (not the node provider) and the data center may want a generous amount of time to deal with the issue should the node provider not (be able to) do it themselves. So we cannot assume the full 7 days are available to make a decision: the data center can set an arbitrarily short deadline.

Finally, trying to onboard a copyright owner onto the NNS, while nice for the community is totally unnecessary for the copyright owner. They already have a legal framework that they operate within and probably don’t want to invest any more time and resources than strictly necessary. So them serving DMCA notices is by far the path of lowest resistance for the time being. I’ve worked at YouTube for a long time (and specifically on the technical side of interacting with content owners) and I know first hand the difficulties they had and they years they spent convincing content owners to (1) use Content ID to enforce their copyright (as opposed to just taking legal action against YouTube) and (2) once content owners did make use of Content ID, to monetize content rather than take it down. This on a platform where the content owners stood to make some non-negligible profit at minimum effort. I don’t think the IC is in any position to ask copyright holders to use the NNS to resolve copyright disputes. Not even if a simple DMCA-like process was put in place by the community.

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81

Quite possible, my apologies for spreading misinformation.

82

I believe it is not appropriate that NNS decides about these things. People vote wrong when they risk nothing. Nobody is sensible if it is not their own canister. If the question was: “This is your canister, do you take it down?” then they might respond differently.

It would have been better if we had a “Jury dApp”. Like the NNS but specialised on cases.

With Reviewers (stake ICP & get rewards for voting in cases), Reporters & Canister Holders. All anonymous and transparently decentralised. No KYC except on the reporters who should reveal they are indeed the owners.

When reported, owners check dApp and reply in X hours. Jury (e.g. 10 random reviewers) takes decision.

Canister holders could pay the fees for each case they receive if they want their case go through the jury dApp instead of the NNS. And only for cases of clear copyrights infringement with reporter submitting clear evidence about their identity and report (not just a scammer reporting from a fake email address) or illicit content i.e. raping, crime, pedophilia, necrophilia etc.

For reference I receive tens of reports every day on my platforms and most are scams. People who benefit from taking others’ content down. Another example, imagine a Youtuber reporting another Youtuber for nudity so he decreased competition.

AWS FYI doesn’t take any VM down. They send you notification about the report and is up to the owner to clean if there is violation. Or if AWS receives a legal action of course.

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