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.
So you say something like twitter is free to host child porn and they can just say "We did not post it, we just make it available"?
No, not exactly. It's more like "a service isn't held responsible for what users do with it". If an analogy is helpful, imagine charging the phone company because two people arranged a bank robbery over the phone. That's what section 230 prevents. (It's more complicated than I'm making it but for our purposes the complications aren't pertinent.)
LW was in no danger at all, assuming that if they were contacted about copyright violations, they react in a sane way, by taking down the offending content.
The whole
I'm sorry, where exactly in the German law is this "section 230" you people all keep mentioning?
Don't even get me started. Go ahead and ask any of the admins which copyright laws they're so terrified of. They'll tell you US laws.