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Libera Chat receives legal advice that the Online Safety Act does not apply to

67 pointsposted an hour ago

13 Comments

CaptainOfCoit

an hour ago

Really grateful that a project like this took on the task to ask for legal advice, and extra kudos for actually releasing a statement based on their understanding of the legal advice. Hopefully will be useful to lots of similar organizations.

Libera.chat seems to say that even if Ofcom thinks they have a case, they don't as Libera's user base doesn't have enough UK users:

> The exact fraction of the UK’s online population that must use a given service to be considered “significant” is unknown, but based on our counsel’s observations of Ofcom’s previous regulatory actions, it appears to be much higher than our internal estimates of how large our UK user base is.

Related submission with 788 comments from ~1 week ago: "4Chan Lawyer publishes Ofcom correspondence" - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45614148

blibble

27 minutes ago

significant can mean anything ofcom want it to

their entire post is sophistry and wishful thinking, neither of which will work if ofcom decide to go after them

the intention of the OSA is to attempt to regulate user-to-user communications services, of which IRC is one

they're probably right that they're near bottom of the list though

(at least until this blog post ends up on their desk monday morning)

NoboruWataya

4 minutes ago

> significant can mean anything ofcom want it to

You're right in the sense that they can pursue whomever they want based on whatever interpretation of "significant" they may hold. But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.

blibble

a few seconds ago

> But it is not Ofcom that ultimately decides on the meaning of the term, that is for a court to decide and that court would likely rely on the same authorities and principles that Libera's lawyers did in their advice.

assuming of course libera don't fold the moment they receive a nastygram ("enforcement notice")

like they did when andrew lee commandeered freenode

Daviey

22 minutes ago

If they were persued, I assume they'd shut down. At the same time, a new IT service called "freechat" or "librenode" would start up.

jamesbelchamber

an hour ago

> Speaking of which, the memo implies that “significance” in this context is interpreted as being relative to the population of the UK, not relative to the user base of the service. We have seen risk assessments that take the other interpretation and consider their UK user base to be “significant” because it makes up a large portion of their overall user base, but the advice we received suggests we should not use this interpretation.

Interesting - this implies that the vast majority of niche communities are not considered to be in scope, so long as they're not on a service like Discord I guess.

kelnos

29 minutes ago

Perhaps, but this sort of thing is a part of the problem: the law itself is written vaguely enough that Ofcom could at any time change their interpretation and decide that previously out-of-scope communities are now in-scope, and go after them.

It's just a variation of selective enforcement.

delichon

an hour ago

The frog wants a plan for when they inevitably turn up the heat by reinterpreting significance. The time to hop out may be now.

kelnos

31 minutes ago

I was expecting/hoping that the legal advice was that an IRC network isn't subject to the law, but it seems like the only advice here was "you're based in Sweden and have only trivial ties to the UK, so the UK/Ofcom can't reasonably go after you".

That feels like a kinda "duh" thing? Even though the UK believes they can enforce this law abroad, if I were running a service outside of UK jurisdiction that would otherwise be subject to the Online Safety Act, I certainly wouldn't comply with it.

busymom0

30 minutes ago

> TL;DR: the legal firm we’ve engaged has sent us a memo indicating that in their opinion we can reasonably argue we do not have sufficient links to the UK for the Online Safety Act to be applicable to us. They also believe we would be at low risk of attempted enforcement action even if Ofcom does consider us to be in-scope for the OSA. We will continue to ensure that this is the case by keeping internal estimates of our UK user base and by continuing with our current efforts to keep Libera.Chat reasonably safe. We have no plans to institute any ID requirements for the forseeable future.

Is it just me or is this not super confidence inspiring for what happens in the future? This just seems like an arbitrary time in future when they either have enough UK users or if Ofcom suddenly lowers or entirely removes the arbitrary "size" estimate, OSA will become applicable? As far as I can tell, we don't even know what this arbitrary "size" estimate is?

consumer451

36 minutes ago

For anyone who read the post title incorrectly, as I did initially:

Libera.chat: an IRC network

LibreChat: an open-source chat application that supports multiple AI models and provides a UI similar to ChatGPT

I was only familiar with the latter, which is a very cool and useful project.

Telemakhos

24 minutes ago

It used to be that a lot of free and open source developers would hang out on Freenode IRC to communicate with users; then things happened, and Libera was forked from Freenode.

susam

9 minutes ago

Indeed! I have very fond memories of the early days of Freenode. It was where I picked up a great deal of wisdom from channels like #math, #regex, #python, #c, #music, #english, etc. Growing up in a place without much of a technology or academic crowd around me, Freenode (along with Yahoo 'Programming:1' chat room) became my window to the world. These were some of the few places where I could connect with like-minded people from all over the world and learn something new every day just by talking to them.

It's a shame how the Freenode network ended on a very controversial note. I, along with several others, used to run the #algorithms channel on Freenode. When the Freenode staff resigned and moved to Libera Chat, our #algorithms community migrated to Libera Chat too. I've written a little more about this here, in case anyone is interested in the details: https://susam.net/algorithms-channel-migrates-to-libera-chat...

But that migration also showed how resilient IRC communities can be. For me, for our #algorithms community, and for many other IRC acquaintances I've known over the years, the move from Freenode to Libera Chat took only about 30 minutes. Personally, all I had to do was point my ZNC bouncer to the new server, register my nick, register my channels, and that was it.