Removal of piracy communities
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.
I'm not sure about the legal implications here. None of those communities are on Lemmy.world, google isn't liable for websites that exist so a lemmy instance shouldn't be liable for a community just because it exists.
It's a similar claim that torrent sites have been using for years and it's just not working in court.
Torrent sites exist solely to serve up torrents. Lemmy is just an aggregate of many, many sites, it can't possibly vet every single one, and if it tries then we are on the path to censorship.
It's perfectly reasonable that those torrents link to perfectly legally accessible content, and digital backups of purchased and owned licence software. Doesn't mean a host can afford to fight the media companies if they come after them.
Censorship always happens, you'd be disappointed if they didn't censor CSAM.
This is true, but the cost to defend this in court can be insane, especially against a media conglomerate.
Your analogy to Google is flawed. Google links to content on other sites. Lemmy sites host distinct copies of content on each instance. While the communities aren't @lemmy.world communities the content is 100% hosted on Lemmy.world by nature of federation.
https://lemmy.ml/post/3375472
https://lemmy.world/post/3234363
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/2148792
All this post. Hosted on three completely different instances, with different admins. "It's not actually my community" doesn't work in the Fediverse.
If the original post gets hit with DMCA and the original host instance complies, does it get removed from all instances?
By design, yes, but there's a number of things that can go wrong that can cause the remote instances to not receive (or comply with) the instruction to do so.