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Comment by amelius | Hacker News Reader

Starting from May 18, 2018, the EU will enforce "the right to be forgotten".

Will it be illegal to run IPFS servers within the EU?

Running IPFS by itself does not mean you're hosting all content in the IPFS network. Rather, you need to explicitly agree to share content for it to be served.

If you are hosting certain content, I guess someone can approach the node owner and request you to take the content offline. But nodes outside EU could still host the content.

> Rather, you need to explicitly agree to share content for it to be served.

Hmm, how do you do that? My node is sharing all content in its cache by default, AFAICT.

Accessing content puts it in the cache, which would be removed when `ipfs repo gc` is run (or automatically at certain points). However, content that is pinned will survive the GC, which is the explicit approval of content that should be seeded for as long as the node exists (or until you run `ipfs pin rm $HASH && ipfs repo gc`)

Ah, by "all content" you meant "all content", I see. Yes, but "explicit agreement" is just "loading the content", so it's not very explicit.

I think this might actually be covered by existing data protection legislation; if you're publishing personal information about someone, it doesn't make any difference whether that's on IPFS or whatever. You'll have to be amenable to takedown requests.

(Copyright will make this an issue first, though!)

The right to be forgotten does not censure publication. It is censorship on search.

Exactly - the right to be forgotten only applies to the results of search engines when querying an individual's name, so publishing or hosting "forgotten" content wouldn't be illegal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_to_be_forgotten

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