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Removal of piracy communities
(lemmy.world)
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this post was submitted on 15 Aug 2023
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These communities are not even hosted on lemmy.world, this is an absurdly overreacted response. There were no signs of any legal trouble and I can't understand how lemmy.world specifically would be the target of such legal action. If you want to host an instance, you should do everything in your power to allow discussions on any topic, while in necessary cases disallowing direct posting/linking of illegal content. Instead, you chose to block a community that has long been known to avoid having any trouble with the moderators.
And on top of this, the removals were done following the request from a troll account, by a user involved in far more questionable discussions than the legal discussions currently going on in the now-removed communities. Should no attempt be made to differentiate between a legit legal concern and trolling?
Good ol' Bungiefan_ak, creating troll accounts on any instance that'll have them to troll all things piracy and post transphobic and hateful shit wherever they go.
dude is such a piece of shit
They only do it because it works. Had they been given the level of attention—and interaction—that trolls deserve, they would quickly move on to doing other things with their life. But as long as one single well-placed comment can result in so many people getting annoyed from so many different perspectives, it's easy to see the appeal that these trolls see...
If you post to a community that isn't local, the content of the post is stored on your local server and the remote server just makes a copy. The posters home server is where the illegal content is hosted.
Yes, so illegal content will end up being stored on both servers. The thing is that the piracy communities don't allow illegal content to be stored or linked to for the same liability reasons.
Which has me wondering why these moves make sense at all. So many people are jumping to the defense of a knee-jerk reaction to a 10h old troll account. Why was that the admins' solution to a random post from a new account? Plus, pirate communities shared vast amounts of information and a lot of it is not directly related to piracy itself.
Any specific infringement material (by which I mean media) would only be on the user's home server. Links to content aren't what is actionable for a DMCA notice as far as I'm aware. And the DMCA does not require platforms to actively monitor or remove potentially infringing content, only to follow the takedown procedure when sent an appropriate notification. If they follow that then they are protected from liability. That's US law but IIRC the implementations in most of the rest of the world are similar if not the same. And here's the rub: even without those communities, LW will still need to have a DMCA agent and take action against content when notified because people can and will upload infringing media here on other communities.
They're not exposing themselves to additional risk by having the piracy communities unblocked. People can and will discuss piracy, in abstract terms at the very least, all over the place. And discussion of copyright infringement is not copyright infringement anyway. Any liability and risk they do hold they will still have to worry about now regardless.
The ad hominem criticism is irrelevant. The communities should be removed or not removed based on the server's policies regardless of who first raised the question.
It's not ad hominem to say someone is acting in bad faith.
Preemptive strike
aka shoot and ask questions later
Doesn't matter if they are hosted here or not. The way federation works is that threads on different instances are cached locally.
We have NO issues with the people at db0 - we are just looking out for ourselves in a 'better safe than sorry' fashion while we find out more. As mentioned in the OP we would like to unblock as soon as we know we can not get in any legal trouble.
"we are just looking out for ourselves in a 'better safe than sorry' fashion while we find out more."
This is an unfortunate aspect of individuals/small groups housing the fediverse vs big companies. Big companies have lawyers and the capital to back them, individuals do not.
If I was in your shoes, I'd do the same thing. I appreciate your wish for thus to be temporary. I hope you will share your findings once you come to a final decision; information like this is relevant to all those managing servers.
What needs to happen for you to be confident you won't get in legal trouble, and thus unblock them? Change on the db0 side? Lemmy.world admins getting legal representation/advice? Something else? I'm curious how you all see this playing it out in the future.
Highly doubt there's anything db0 can do. lemmy.world is in Europe, piracy has hefty legal ramifications.
Like you could argue that it isn't piracy all you want, but if faced with the possibility of your hobby landing you decades in prison and millions in debt, would you do it?
Just create an account at db0, this really isn't the big deal people make it out to be.
Not all of Europe. In most parts (especially Eastern Europe) the most you will get is a slap on the wrist if you are really really unlucky. And decades in prison aren't a thing anywhere for simply sharing links to pirated content.
Discussing piracy isn’t illegal. It would be one thing if they were hosting pirated content, but they don’t even link to anything.
If that were to change I’d understand the decision, but this just seems silly to me.
Well, caching content is not the same as copying it. The major difference in the court would be that caching is automatic - and as such you are not in complete responsibility of what it is you copied. If you do everything in your power to comply with any DMCA notices, then I couldn't realistically see lemmy.world being targeted. This is an analogous situation to eg. accidentally opening a website containing illegal content. Sure, your computer did download the contents to the RAM, but what matters is that you acted in good faith and did not attempt to get the contents, it just happened in the process of browsing the web and as such you could not reasonably expect to receive such content.
Complacency isn't a legitimate defense against criminal activity and corporations are extremely litigious over piracy. Would you rather lemmy.world spend all their money on fighting lawsuits, or building a better instance?
Any community that is creating questionable content should create their own instance and not seek open federation with the entire fediverse. That kind of behavior is reckless and counterproductive to what we're trying to do here.
Something that’s getting lost in this conversation is the nature of the infringement and what that means to the copyright holder. Memes could be considered a form of infringement, however in practice they often serve as free publicity. The intent is not to deprive the copyright holder of revenue, but use the medium to express themselves. Exposure increases, and so does the likelihood of revenue from the conversion of new fans.
This changes with public conversations of piracy, because the nature of those conversations drift into how to deprive and evade the copyright holder by providing users just enough information to find pirated content. From a legal standpoint this can be used to prove aiding and abetting, a crime that be considered equal or an accessory to depending on the jurisdiction.
The admins are aware of how Lemmy's content caching works, and now publicly acknowledge the existence of their federation with dbzer0; whose piracy communities are its strongest asset. Any defense of ignorance is out the door. Without banning the communities LW becomes an accessory if dbzer0 becomes liable, as would any other instance who caches dbzer0's c/piracy.
To those who still disagree, that's fine. Open your password manager, make some new accounts on other instances, enjoy the lemmyverse. But you have to agree that it is unreasonable to demand you hold the evidence of my crimes because it would inconvenience me otherwise.
as far as i have seen (as a subscriber to c/piracy) there is no links to pirated content and they are very clear that that is not allowed
the vast majority of the discussion is on morals of piracy, anti piracy measures, etc etc
Soo ultimately you personally will be the only person determining what people can and can't see, based on your perception alone. You don't like something, you'll ban it. You worry about something, you'll ban it. And there won't be a trace without you saying "we banned something". Which means there are no checks at all to you powertripping in the future. How is this supposed to be free, open and general then? This is even worse than reddit was.
You fucking donkey, did you read their comment before you replied to it? They aren't doing it just because they want to; there are legal implications.
The great thing is, now you're 100% empowered to move forward and host the responsibility yourself. Demanding volunteers shoulder potential liability (when you yourself admit you can't understand how there's any in the first place) is juvenile.
The moment a volunteer is hit with a DMCA notice or any threat of legal action, you think they have any interest in going through the court system? You can do it first.
I think you don't understand what a DMCA notice actually is. The whole point of it is to give you a chance to remove offending content. The "threat" of legal action won't actually result in anything, provided you comply, and that is exactly why I do not understand the preemptive actions, when there is basically no such thing as immediate legal threat in case of DMCA notices. The copyright holders often do not want to go through the court system either and will gladly accept pre-legal-action compliance.
You seem to know your way around the law then, so please be the change you want to see in this world. Host a piracy instance and show everyone here that we were wrong and that the admins were just overreacting.
I can openly admit I am breaking the law for example by using torrents for piracy - and I seed as much as I can, though it in theory makes me liable. So yes, I am the change I want to see - piracy should be free to discuss everywhere
You can go further: host a piracy instance since you seem confident enough and prove us wrong. Why are you avoiding this part? I'm not the only one having suggested this to you.
And here you are (after fighting with docker for an hour) http://pankuleczka.ydns.eu/
Sure, if someone uses it then it's no problem for me. There are much bigger communities already out there though, so I see no reason to do that. I'll set it up right now to show you
Be the change you want to see -should be the catchphrase specifically for lemmy trolls
it really isn't, the whole point is to streamline the capability for copyright holders to remove content they think they have rights to, without a lengthy court cases. it's still a lot of overhead for any service to manage and also still opens you up to legal action.
From DMCA.com:
The power of the panopticon lies not in being able to see and punish all deviant activity, but to encourage self-correction in all potential deviants who must always assume they are being watched.
I agree with the point, but US-wise, especially if you aren't even the site actually as the source of truth for the community, you almost definitely don't go to court unless you counterclaim. If you get a claim and nuke the offending communities in response (assuming you don't have tools to block specific posts in the communities, but that would also work), you have protections built in.
Lemmyworld is hosted in Germany, they have agressive anti-piracy laws
Wasn't it hosted in Finland? Or have things changed?
The content is hosted on lemmy.world - that's how the fediverse works. Each instance pushes updates to other instances and they host it locally for their users. The issue is that the admins here can't moderate a community not on their instance. So if an instance is located somewhere it is legal, it might not be legal at the location of another instance.
Lemmy.world maintains a local copy of every external community. This is how federation works. Any piracy related posts on those subs will be copied in their entirety to lemmy.world servers, so lemmy.world could potentially be sued for hosting that content. Being the largest instance makes it a target.
It is rare to get advanced notice of legal problems. Usually the first you hear about it is a cease and desist, or a lawsuit. Lawsuits are costly to defend even if you're doing nothing wrong.
I don't like this decision. But it is a sensible one to protect the instance. If you care about piracy discussions you can visit those communities directly or on a different instance that made a different decision.
There is no suing for that, talking about piracy is perfectly legal. That's called freedom of speech for your information
Anyone can sue anyone for anything. All it takes to have a lawsuit is to submit a filing fee to a court, and someone to serve the papers.
There are many lawsuits that are baseless. There are many lawsuits that are frivolous. If your instance is on the receiving end of one of these lawsuits you will have pay for a lawyer to defend yourself regardless of the merits of the case.
Courts don't proactively decide whether someone can or cannot be sued.
I enjoyed helping this place grow and doing my part to discuss here but I disagree with this decision and I'm going to evaluate looking for a different home instance.
What signs of legal trouble are you referring to?