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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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[-] tcj@lemmy.world 33 points 1 year ago

I don't understand how lemmy world has removed them, aren't those all communities on different servers? How is this our problem?

[-] Obsession@lemmy.world 20 points 1 year ago

Because of the way Lemmy works, all content from federated instances is mirrored (minus images). So technically, all the piracy content also lives on lemmy.world, which makes them liable for it.

[-] tcj@lemmy.world 9 points 1 year ago

So the images, video, etc isn't cached here, it's just text and links? Sites generally aren't liable for what is on the other side of links, they just have to remove the link if they are notified by the copyright holder that it's infringing their rights.

[-] Cabrio@lemmy.world 14 points 1 year ago

I'm sure individual instance owners have robust legal teams for handling and processing an untold number of takedown requests.

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

If they want to air on the safe side, as they appear to here, they can just auto-approve any takedown request. Just as robust a legal protection, while still allowing more content to be online.

[-] f4te@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago

they blocked access for lemmy.world users.

[-] Underwear@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago

Which I think is a problem in the structure of lemmy. I can understand them banning c/piracy from being hosted on lemmy.world, but blocking access to other communities on other instances from all of their users is really an issue. As a user I shouldn't have to create a new account to be able to see something hosted on lemmy.ml, no matter what the admins of my home instance think about it.

I think it should be up to the community admin to find an instance that supports them, not both the community creator and every user that wants to see that content.

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

I think it should be up to the community admin to find an instance that supports them, not both the community creator and every user that wants to see that content.

What's a "community admin"? The server owner? It is up to them, that's the whole point of the fediverse, you as the admin decide what people can see on your server, but everyone can also be their own admin if they so desire.