this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023

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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]

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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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[–] [email protected] 95 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The fact that there was no announcement before the banning of the communities is not great, but good on you for acknowledging that mistake.

It's unfortunate that this action had to be done, but it's also understandable. It's not about what's right or wrong, and it's not even about whether there actually is any illegal content in these communities. It's about the fact that the Big Entertainment Companies don't care about the difference and see it ALL as bad, irregardless of whether it actually is illegal or not. If the admin team had a legal team and the financial security to fight back, then it wouldn't be as much of an issue. But they're not, they're just a bunch of regular folks, so they're being cautious and trying to pre-emptively prevent these problems from coming up, especially as Lemmy continues to grow every day.

The beauty of the Fediverse is that you can always switch instances or make an alt account.

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

The beauty of the Fediverse is that you can always switch instances or make an alt account.

Exactly. I'm deciding between these two - I am not impressed at all on how this was handled, and I have already decided that I am not going to be loyal to this instance. Half contemplating migrating everything and screwing off honestly, but I am scared of my new smaller home instance disappearing into the void, bringing my entire account with it, which is why I chose lemmy.world. to begin with. Is that a thing that might happen?

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

Possibly.

You should look for middle sized instances. Those are not as big as lemmy.world so they're less likely to have to do this kind of stuff, but also big and steady enough that they're not likely to randomly disappear one day.

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Fun fact: "irregardless" is a nonsense word.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I like it though.

[–] [email protected] -4 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

It's a precept of law that you actually have to have standing to pursue a lawsuit. An arbitrary "rights holder" can't successfully pursue a lawsuit on the grounds that people are speaking about a type of action that could hypothetically affect them, at least not in the US.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)

Edit - Guess lemmy.world is in Germany, but shouldn't be too different.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago

In Germany, linking to legally problematic content can itself see you facing fines, in one of the shittiest legal developments in years other than not banning the AfD.

So yeah, I can totally see them rather avoid all exposure.

And in Germany music rights are mostly all centralized in one umbrella organization, so they can trivially declare they're affected. (fuck the music industry, but that's besides the point)

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

The unfortunate reality is that the arbitrary "rights holders" have leveraged their held rights to gain a lot of money, unlike the maintainers of lemmy.world, which don't have a bunch of cash lying around.

In this day and age, money can create allegations to drown someone in lawyers, and just defending against such allegations, regardless of their validity, can be prohibitively expensive.