Upcoming proposal and discussion on content moderation

You can say Bitcoin and Ethereum are not alegal in the sense they have their own native legal (consensus) systems but that would be bending the meaning of alegal which is commonly understood to refer to nation state rules.

Yeah, I’ve been using Dapp interchangeably with canister more or less. You’re right.

The NNS can still vote to take these down though, no?

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Uh… so what are we going to do?

When a future ICP game developer spends thousands of hours on creating a great game and then someone else duplicates their code and starts giving it away for free we’re just going to say, “too bad, canisters are unstoppable, you don’t get any rights to your creative output.”

Property rights, copyrights, and intellectual property have a place, at least until we can find a better mechanism.

I’m hopeful, for example, that there are alternative mechanisms to enable patents and copyrights in an era of crypto. But that doesn’t mean that we can just ignore their importance in the meantime.

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You’re facts aren’t wrong, but your interpretation of them is. For example, The TPPA was under negotiation for 5 years primarily because of American intellectual property enforcement requirements. The fact Trump canned was just what put it to bed. It’s the US putting intellectual property enforcement into trade deals that has created that green map.

I could analyse your critique of my other points but I need to go to bed.

I am out here flying around, canvassing the community, speaking to people directly, regularly running online surveys to understand sentiment. I’m not paid to do it, I just do it so I can provide the best support and guidance to this community possible. I’m not an ideologue - but I am a salesperson and this is really hard to sell.

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Quadratic funding is the solution you’re looking for.

Just found out that Mario 64 is widely hosted in web2.0:

e.g. 1) Super Mario 64 - Play now online! | Kiz10.com

e.g. 2) Play Super Mario 64 Online – Nintendo 64(N64) – Emulator Games Online

e.g. 3) Super Mario 64 - Play Game Online

e.g. 4) SUPER MARIO 64 free online game on Miniplay.com

e.g. infinity) play Mario 64 online at DuckDuckGo

Places where Mario 64 is down: 1) The IC: web3.0 : https://culg2-qyaaa-aaaai-qa7sa-cai.raw.ic0.app/

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:rofl: :rofl:

Now that’s ironic!

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Quadratic voting is definitely interesting, but no I don’t think that’s the solution when it comes to intellectual property.

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You can say blockchains are alegal all you want, but it won’t matter of our node operators end up in jail. Listen, I’m all for code is law, DAOs, etc. But we have to face the reality of the situation which is there is credible legal risk to node operators. Until there is much more popular support for crypto, that will be the case. And what good is it if we just end up turning the IC into a niche child porn hosting service that lives in the fringes of society? Anarchy/non-governance is not the way forward.

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This is two side of a coin. To me, It looks like an opportunity for ICP here. Just imagine if IP owner feel safer that their copywright is more protected on ICP Web3 rather than legacy Web2. This open opportunity for future adoption from big corporations. It is up to ICP community how to leverage this for the future growth. I want to inspire ICP community / developer to rethink and innovate a way, how to protect IP without touching censorship in ICP. If we can make it possible, it is opening a flood gate of adoption

Not if we remove this proposal type. That’s my understanding at least

An onion router isn’t a good idea when there’s a central authority to sue… It might be an interesting idea for Badlands?

I think we and to pick our battles and this isn’t one of them.

It would be different if it was about censorship or something where there was any legal or moral basis.

The canister is nothing special-- just a pre-existing browser-based emulator where the file[s] happen to be downloaded to the browser from the Internet Computer. I would prefer Nintendo not walk away with a chunk of our battle chest over this.

Let’s fight over an issue worth fighting over when it presents itself, not a gimmicky canister running a 20 year old game.

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You don’t view this as low-stakes “practice” for when the real game is afoot?

And the real game can get very very very nefarious, very quickly.

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If enough people don’t think Nintendo has a fair claim, then it shouldn’t be removed IMO. If not, where does it stop?

Too many opinions to make a AUP where one size would fit all. Each issue has to be a NNS vote to remove the canister in question. I think perhaps maybe we could agree on some strict AUP such as no child pornography that wouldn’t require a vote, but anything relating to free speech or DMCA is kind of up in the air. Speaking from experience, I’ve been targetted unfairly with DMCA by a competitor and luckily the DMCA process let me rebuttal and they didn’t want to pay legal fees to take it further.

In these scenarios, I agree with lastmjs that we need to protect the node providers. DFINITY must use its available resources to hire attorneys to come up with plausible deniability or whatever it takes to not hold the node providers liable when the NNS agrees to disobey country X’s laws. I am not against exposing some amount of risk to node providers if they are located in susceptible jurisdictions (risk vs reward).

I also wouldn’t be against node providers rejecting a canister but only if another provider has agreed pick it up. I don’t think we should punish these node providers but instead reward the ones who can take on legally complicated content.

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I think the best that could happen is if something like this occurs again, the canister can be suspended until the owner ID’s themselves, turn it back on and we throw them to the wolves and let them deal with it. nimby :slight_smile:

these things really shouldn’t be our problem, there’s like 190+ countries with all sorts of different rules. if some content on some node violates some regulation or law frankly I didn’t sign up to be part of some political movement here around freedom of whatever.

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however let’s take another example from history. As some may know IBM was involved in the census machine market for a very long time. IBM’s IP and machines and associated population data contained on punch cards had been used by the Nazis to hunt down and kill millions of Europe’s Jews, along with enabling the Nazi war machine in industries in general.

In the future what if someone were to start using canisters like the Nazi’s used IBM’s machines?

Perhaps Super Mario is a silly child’s game but we all know machines can be used for far worse.

It was a piece of luck that the first case involving taking down a canister was so easily resolved. It exposed gaps in Dfinity’s prep, divisions within the community, and the need to address both before a more serious threat comes along.
My big takeaway from this discussion is that no real progress towards censorship resistance can happen while we know what information each node holds. As long as node providers and the data centres that host them are exposed, few will risk hosting nodes in places where censorship is stringent, with contraventions of regulations leading to imprisonment. I am thinking of places like South Asia, China, Russia, West Asia, most of Africa outside South Africa, and so on. To lose these will, in turn, undermine the hierarchy of node, data centre, geography and jurisdiction that is at the heart of Dfinity’s vision of censorship resistance.

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We have collectively put in A LOT OF EXCELLENT IDEAS into this topic. My question is : WHERE IS DFINITY in this discussion? Are they going to be bystanders? Are they going to say “oh we wanted the community to have their say before we opined on this topic?”

It would be, imo, VERY USEFUL to have DFINITY as PART of this discussion RATHER than a spectator watching “a game”.

Currently , as the situation stands, from the initial post, the following conclusions are fairly obvious from the community, I think:

  1. Firstly this topic itself is extremely concerning to the community; because we thought that this was planned to be handled from a. Technical, b. Legal and c. Operational standpoint by DFINITY a long time ago. The various reasons why we think so are documented in multiple posts in this topic. That said, here are the additional points.

  2. OPERATIONAL: We have identified that IC should prepare the node providers for how to respond to “take-down” notices. The “take-down” in quotes because it takes many different things into consideration. Dan(@dostro ) is leading the charge here. Proposal for guidelines upon receipt of DMCA notices

  3. TECHNICAL: We have identified significant gaps in the current design of IC which leads to several weaknesses on our claims to “designed to be censorship resistant”. Jordan(@lastmjs ) is leading the charge here. Plausible deniability for node operators

  4. LEGAL: I believe that both operational and technical aspects will require significant help from legal side to make IC most censorship resistant. Further i believe, based on some of the posts here, that DFINITY would be able provide this help based on their prior work.

  5. The proposal of AUP IS ON HOLD as far as I can see because there is no broad consensus on how an AUP can be formulated or whether it should be formulated at all.

  6. Censorship cannot be just plonked on the community and say just vote on it; where the proposed abstains from even voting. There has to a commonly agreed-to vision (even if we are not there yet) and a roadmap to getting to the vision. Then, to satisfy the short-term needs, sure, we might need to take down a canister or two. BUT only in context of a larger picture (the vision) as we begin to make the platform stronger in face of opposition.

  7. This point is just a comment. Obviously this is extremely taxing for everyone who is passionately involved; both from a time as well as emotions.

I believe that IC represents the BEST opportunity to unshackle us from the tyranny of big-tech. However I also think that this topic is the existential threat to the vision of IC.

REST ASSURED: corporations and , through political donations (“free speech”), governments will FIGHT IC tooth and nail.

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Hell a corporation qualifies as community ownership. These things exist everywhere (eg AWS) now so I don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t need The IC for community ownership.

Do you really see no difference? How much influence — do you think — did APPL share holders have on Apple’s decision to remove Navalny’s App from the Russian app store?

The point you and seemingly almost everyone sees to miss is if the NNS starts “picking battles” it’ll be seen as a powerful entity making governance decisions outside of democratic control, thus undermining state authority. It will be brought to heal.

If the NNS stays out of the moderation game, states will only go after individual users using other tools such as blockchain analysis like they do with other blockchains and decentralised systems such as TOR.

Remember Silk Road? Did the government try to ban Bitcoin or TOR? No they did not. They went after Ross Ulbricht and used various investigatory tools available to them above the protocol level. They did this because they saw the protocols as autonomous. If the IC is actively governed like Facebook is, they’ll go after it as opposed to individual users.

Learn from history people!

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