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Removal of piracy communities - Lemmy.world
alexandrite.appEarlier, 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: - [email protected]
[/c/[email protected]] - [email protected] [/c/[email protected]] -
[email protected] [/c/[email protected]] 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.
Seems like an overreaction considering how many degrees of separation the instance has from actual pirated stuff. No pirated content is hosted on dbzer0, no direct links to pirated content either. Even if a copyright holder takes issue with the community it would seem unlikely for them to target one of hundreds of instances which federate and have it cached rather than the actual source instance itself.
That being said, I don’t know where lemmy.world’s servers are located, some places are pretty strict with piracy. Even if it’s a small chance I can see how, from the perspective of an admin, it wouldn’t be worth risking the whole instance and potential legal action.
Still seems like an extreme response to me, but hey, beauty of the fediverse and all that. I chose a small instance specifically to avoid defederations like this and I’m perfectly happy with it (thanks for hosting neo).