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Removal of piracy communities (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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Earlier, after review, we blocked and removed several communities that were providing assistance to access copyrighted/pirated material, which is currently not allowed per Rule #1 of our Code of Conduct. The communities that were removed due to this decision were:

We took this action to protect lemmy.world, lemmy.world's users, and lemmy.world staff as the material posted in those communities could be problematic for us, because of potential legal issues around copyrighted material and services that provide access to or assistance in obtaining it.

This decision is about liability and does not mean we are otherwise hostile to any of these communities or their users. As the Lemmyverse grows and instances get big, precautions may happen. We will keep monitoring the situation closely, and if in the future we deem it safe, we would gladly reallow these communities.

The discussions that have happened in various threads on Lemmy make it very clear that removing the communites before we announced our intent to remove them is not the level of transparency the community expects, and that as stewards of this community we need to be extremely transparent before we do this again in the future as well as make sure that we get feedback around what the planned changes are, because lemmy.world is yours as much as it is ours.

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[-] lwadmin@lemmy.world -4 points 1 year ago

Sure. But we're a group of volunteers and we would not like to find out the hard way what is possible and what not. We would think meta discussions about piracy should be allowed as long as there is no linking to actual illegal content.
But is pointing to locations with illegal content legal or not? And having members/admins worldwide it makes it even harder to be sure.

We don't want to find out the hard way and this is a better safe than sorry measure. Again we personally have nothing against the people on these communities or against the communities itself.

[-] xXxBigJeffreyxXx@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago

should go ahead and ban image uploading to lemmy.world, as there is likely a ton of illegal, copyright-violating content that hasn't been stress-tested for fair use.

[-] NOT_RICK@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

The music community could be an issue for the same reason, this logic is problematic

[-] CaptainEffort@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

Smart, might as well shut down this whole thread then as we’re discussing piracy here too, right?

[-] kratoz29@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

I love Piracy!

[-] snake@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Did you ever consider ceding ownership of the instance to an entity with greater legal capabilities?

In the end, it will not make sense to try to keep this instance running if the owners are unable to provide adequate service to its users.

[-] sab@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Yikes. Bit trigger happy with the ban hammer there. It's at -40, isn't that filtering enough?

Edit: it was an instance ban initially, this is more reasonable.

[-] Weslee@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

Eesh if posting a slightly hurtful comment is enough to get an entire instance ban... I wasn't going to move home instance just because of those communities but the bans is way more of an eye opener.

[-] assassin_aragorn@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

to an entity with greater legal capabilities?

Someone who has the necessary legal capabilities is going to be a corporation. And that's exactly why we left Reddit.

[-] void_wanderer@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

No. In Germany we have something called gGmbH. It's basically a non-profit Limited. But IANAL, no idea if and how this would be able to protect the admins.