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.
What liability?
Admins and owners of instances can potentially be held criminally and civilly liable for anything that gets hosted on their instance.
There was no illegal content hosted in any of those communities.
These same communities already existed/exist on reddit with no issues.
Are you fully versed on all global laws that directly or indirectly target piracy and copyright infringement? Particularly the really murky ones regarding "facilitating infringement".
I'm not.
Reddit has a very large, well paid legal team on retainer and the cost of litigation is factored in to their business model. Reddit prevailed in this case and likely spent at least a year of LW's operating costs doing so.
It doesn't matter whether you're right, it's a matter of being able to afford to prove you're right.
Lawsuits are coming to Lemmy, and there’s literally nothing we can do to stop it. All social media is facing the same crisis of liability, and republicans in America are dead set on killing the rules that currently protect them.
Lemmy.world is always at risk of dumb lawsuits for defedirating exploding heads (“silencing conservative voices in social media”), god knows how many asshole patent trolls, plus their huge gaping GDPR non-compliance.
The EU could literally destroy this all tomorrow if they wanted. Driving up the user base, driving up donations, and acquiring their own legal team is the only way any big instance is going to stick around by this time next year.