At various times, most social media platforms have received criticism for alleged failure to prevent distribution of copyright-infringing content. Few, however, have been threatened with widespread blocking more often than Telegram. In a row that seemed ready to boil over last year, Telegram was given an ultimatum by the Malaysian government; come to the negotiating table or face the consequences. A Malaysian minister now says that Telegram is ready to fight piracy.
How much responsibility would a service like Signal have, if they were to inadvertently host a private group for pirated content? I believe signal groups can have up to 1000 members, and these members can be pretty anonymous given the need to only share an ephemeral username which can not be linked to a phone number or any other identity? Can they claim plausible deniability and not do anything?
IANAL and all the other anals, but my understanding is Signal wouldn’t be liable and wouldn’t have to do anything. They designed their service so they can’t know the content of the messages, so if a third party Maloyse (see what I’m doing there?) is reporting a message between Alice and Bob that Maloyse thinks to be illegal, Signal would be within legal grounds to bring into question how did M got that message, and it can’t be used as proof against Signal because there is no legal mechanism by which Signal could have acquired that message and act upon it - in fact, Signal has grounds to suspect Maloyse is crafting those messages, since neither Alice nor Bob have reported such message.
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This is the correct answer. Both Alice and Bob approve.
What if that happens on Session? Can the nodes operators be sued even though they have no access to the content?