if i put up a random E2E encrypted messaging side project i made on github and then people started using it for CSAM?

People use government built sidewalks to sell drugs, does that mean I can sue the govt for the drug trade?

The original comment had two prerequisites:

1. If drug dealers used my backyard. 2. If I knew about it and did absolutely nothing about it.

And yes, if the government knows about someone selling drugs and does nothing about it, you can sue the government.

At least in theory, in countries not ridden with corruption (which probably aren't that many).

> if the government knows about someone selling drugs and does nothing about it, you can sue the government.

at least in the US, there are only a few limited times the government is open to civil litigation - and nonenforcement of the law is not usually one of them

I didn't know, nonenforcement is a term. I thought it might be just negligence.

Should've left the "I am not a lawyer" disclaimer.

Thanks for the clarification.

Telegram is not E2E encrypted.

so i should be liable if it is a plain text messaging github side project?

do you really feel this is a good faith analogy? how is a side project in any way similar to a company with billions of users?

i think it is an analogy that is useful in elucidating what people view as the morally relevant aspect.

i don’t think it makes a ton of sense to me that the encryption or lack thereof is the relevant factor - if we think that proprietors of unencrypted messaging should be required to turn over chat logs, then encrypted messaging should probably be illegal or we have left a massive loophole in.

the scale being the relevant issue is another thing as well. i worry that if you somehow create a protocol for dencentralized messaging, you somehow then become liable for misuse of what could have been an academic project, etc.

You mean if you’re also running servers for it that store all the data in a format you can read and refuse law enforcement requests in your jurisdiction.

This is a horrible analogy, is your side project giving free cloud hosting of up to 1.5GB files for 900 million users with no moderation? Yeah, if it is you should go to jail too if you didn't address the issue of CSAM there for a decade.

If you were the one hosting it on your own server and storing CSAM that people were sending, yeah, you should be arrested. Nobody cares if you upload a messenger to github, there's scores of them.