Interesting SCOTUS ruling. Unanimous decision for Cox Communications, which is unusual.

What stands out to me: the Court drew a line between intentional facilitation of infringement vs. just providing infrastructure. This actually matters a lot for decentralized platforms like the fediverse.

If your instance actively indexes, promotes, or makes it easy to find infringing content, you might be on shaky ground. But if you’re just a pipe that federates activity pub streams from other servers? That’s different.

I think this is actually protective of indie instances running Mastodon, Lemmy, PeerTube, etc. You don’t know what every user uploaded. The “intent” requirement is a real shield.

That said, I’d be curious to see how this plays out. Will instances start being sued for “providing the service”? That’s where the line gets blurry.

Rare SC W.

Corporate interests 🤝 Pirate interests