Copyright and DMCA Best Practices for Fediverse Operators
For instance and community operators, "copyright’s “statutory damages” regime allows for massive, unpredictable financial liability. That’s why it’s important to limit your risk." This guide helps you to get started.
A useful guide for anyone who is running their own community space — which includes folks running Mastodon instances, Bluesky hosts, RSS services, and so on. As the author explains in the preamble, there’s the potential for “massive, unpredictable financial liability”. It’s therefore really important to find ways to limit risk.
A lot of this is common sense:
“Finally, make sure that nothing you post or advertise actively encourages copyright infringement. For example, don’t post examples of users uploading copyrighted music or video without permission, or insinuate that your server is a good place for infringing content.”
Some of it is less obvious but still important. For example, responding promptly to DMCA notices — and not ignoring them regardless of technicalities — is one place where a less-savvy operator might fall over.
It’s easy to imagine compliance as a service for these kinds of operators, baked into the platforms themselves. So if you install a Mastodon instance and you could be subject to US law (which isn’t limited to instances operating in the US), there could be an easy way to set up with a service to handle all that for you. It could sit right alongside trust and safety services that are more aligned for community safety.
[Link]
