It's virtually impossible to prevent people from doing it, yes. It's extremely easy to punish people who are doing it. Do you know what charges Aaron Swartz was facing, and what he was aiming to do that got him those charges?

Edit: Actually, these people are a little bit better example, since Aaron Swartz did commit additional crimes in support of the original goal of distributing material from a web site.

[–] rglullis -1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Would you mind explaining why nothing of substance was thrown against the developer of bird.makeup and/or the admins of the numerous Twitter-to-Mastodon bridges?

[–] mo_ztt@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fair question. There are lots of things which happen which are technically illegal which no one cares enough to prosecute. That doesn't mean those things are safe or a good idea. A person I know told me the story of his company deciding "Well if the government doesn't feel like prosecuting our employee for doing X, and they know about it, then probably it's fine" and then the dude got federally indicted a really hilariously short time later. These things do happen; that's why I bring up Aaron Swartz and the people the RIAA sued.

Reddit is a different company from Twitter with different leadership. Twitter seems to be going in the direction of "interoperate with the fediverse and try to steer it" while reddit is still stuck in the mode of "keep stubbornly fucking up and search for people to blame and punish." (Twitter's doing that also, just as part of the fediverse now while they're doing it.) I think the risk of legal action from reddit is a lot more realistic.

It'd be different if I thought that mirroring reddit was a perfectly reasonable thing to do, and they were going to try to prosecute people but that was wrong and so distributing reddit's contents to unrelated people's instances was involving them in something noble. My personal feeling is I don't think that though. I feel like if reddit wants to keep their content off the fediverse they should be allowed to do so, and so you're putting other instance operators at genuine legal risk to accomplish something which shouldn't be done in the first place. Just my personal moral / ethical opinion on it, which colors the way I look at the legal side.

[–] rglullis -2 points 1 year ago

The approach that I am taking here is to have all the user accounts on the mirror instance(s). The idea would be that the people running this should at least get an okay from the "mapped" communities, and any admin that is concerned about the legal aspects of this can simply defederate from the mirrors. I will add that to the docs.