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Removal of piracy communities (self.lemmyworld)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin to c/lemmyworld

1158 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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[–] Hildegarde 36 points 1 year ago (1 children)

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.

[+] [email protected] -19 points 1 year ago (5 children)

There is no suing for that, talking about piracy is perfectly legal. That's called freedom of speech for your information

[–] Hildegarde 25 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

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.

Edit: I say this as a not lawyer, and based on research into courts in the United States of America.

[–] Buffalox 9 points 1 year ago

To encourage and aid in crimes is not covered by free speech in most countries like all of EU. And Lemmy.world is in Finland AFAIK.

[–] void_wanderer 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

One link in one discussion that slips through is basically enough.

[–] bitvoid 4 points 1 year ago

Of course there is suing for that. You can sue for literally anything. They probably wouldn't win such a lawsuit, but they can still file it, which means LW now needs to spend money to fight it.