On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 10:49 AM, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, Apr 7, 2014 at 9:39 AM, Ting Chen wing.philopp@gmx.de wrote:
Files and contents that let's say are legal in the EU but not in the US should of the be able to be stored on a server located in the EU and distributed and operated from there. Files and contents that are legal in PRC and Taiwan and may violate copy right law in the US should be able to be stored in a server say in Taiwan or Hongkong and be distributed from there into the world. This approach is meanwhile technical viable and is used by almost all major international internet providers today.
As I recall, the problem with this suggestion is that it wouldn't actually work that way.
Something like this could work.
For material that's illegal in the US but legal in the EU,
MediaWiki could be designed to more flexibly look for material from multiple sources. This can be host-neutral.
the US branch would be sued despite the material being hosted in the EU.
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if it did work, the individual contributors would still probably have to watch out for liability.
There are problems to overcome. As we have seen, people are sometimes sued even where there is no legal case against them. And sometimes the Internet itself is challenged, ISPs are pressured to change their policies, over content issues. But if you live in a country where a file is legal to copy and share online, and you copy it to a server/website in that country while correctly indicating its (c) status, it is difficult to find fault with that.
How these local websites interact with one another, or with international requests for geo-blocking, or with client readers and international websites that help aggregate their contents, is a trickier question.
A properly designed distributed system could go a long way towards addressing some of the issues noted above. And in the long run this would make the projects more robust against certain attacks that (even with multiple server farms) we are currently vulnerable to. Thanks, Ting, for starting this thread.
SJ