Lemmy.World Announcements

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Removal of piracy communities (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

1016 comments fedilink hide all child comments

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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[+] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You seem to have a fundamental misunderstanding of how federation works and either don't know or don't realize that content is replicated across instances that are federated with each other by virtue of users subscribing to it.

If you are a lemmy.world user subscribed to a piracy community on another instance, then that content is replicated and hosted locally on lemmy.world also. You've never noticed how you can access content that originated on a foreign federated instance and still be able to access that content when the federated instance is down? That content physically resided on the lemmy.world instance until it was blocked.

[+] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

[deleted]

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

True. And yet Cloudflare has to maintain its own army of lawyers to defend the constant barrage of lawsuits against Cloudflare claiming that they are facilitating copyright infringement. The average salary for 'Associate Legal Counsel" at companies like Cloudflare is about US $303,400. (source is Cloudflare themselves: https://www.salary.com/research/salary/employer/cloudflare-inc/associate-legal-counsel-salary )...and that's just one of many. They are literally paying MILLIONS of US Dollars a year to defend against that. You think the admins for Lemmy.World have that kind of pocket change?

Also, "caches" are temporary in nature and are different from permanent local copies (which is the model employed by lemmy). There is a technical difference, and even with that technical difference, Cloudflare still gets sued all the time for it.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago

Will you pay LW's legal fees to prove that in court?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

This is an inaccurate statement. Looking just at US law (there's plenty of others), CDN's that reside or operate within the US are required to comply with DMCA takedowns and any other legal requests made of them. Failure to do so jeopardizes their protection under Section 230 of the DCMA. They 100% can be held civilly and criminally liable for what's in their cache. The US provides a pass, by law, as long as they maintain due diligence.

That's actually very similar to what this story about Reddit was all about. The film studios were trying to build a case to have RCN stripped of their S230 protections.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not that I'm defending this move, but there is a difference between this and your example. iirc, the way Lemmy works, to get content from other instances, this instance "caches" the data and then hosts the data on their server(s) for the users to access. Because of this, the instance is technically hosting the data and could theoretically be held liable in any lawsuits.

Please do correct me if I misunderstand how Lemmy works. Also reading through other comments, it seems like no pirated content is actually hosted on those communities, so I doubt that they could be held liable in the first place.