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Removal of piracy communities (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by lwadmin@lemmy.world to c/lemmyworld@lemmy.world

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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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[-] WraithGear@lemmy.world 12 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I don’t think this was the right call. Don’t have it hosted on here, fine. But defederated? I don’t see how being federated would be an issue at all. Oh well guess i got to actively go seek them out now.

At this rate, you might as well as defederate from all instances. Cant be too careful.

[-] leraje@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago

.world hasn't defederated from either of these two instances. They've blocked .world users from accessing those 3 communities from .world. You, as a .world user can still access any community across those 2 instances, aside from the 3 mentioned. Any users on those instances can still access .world communities.

[-] AustralianSimon@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago

They only blocked those communities, not the whole instance and due to the way federation works stuff over there is copied here.

[-] WraithGear@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

I must admit i am not up on the how’s of the fediverse. But even the instances that were blocked were not in violation themselves let alone every single ancillary that might be connected to them. If we follow the same reasoning, people do not own the memes they post, the videos, the books. And for this action to be initiated by some throw away banned rando means anything with any semblance of teeth will dictate what is federated and what is not

But really it’s whatever i guess, it’s only a minor annoyance. I was planning to have an alter account anyways

[-] AustralianSimon@lemmy.world 0 points 1 year ago

I looked at them and the top 10 posts range from how to pirate games on steam deck, to stealing music to stealing books. Seems like they do violate.

[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Problem is, it IS hosted here. That's the nature of the Fediverse. It doesn't just create links to other instances, it creates distinct copies of content on each instance. I am neither viewing this post on lemmy.world nor responding to it via lemmy.world. I am interacting with a distinct copy hosted on a completely unaffiliated instance, in a completely different country.

[-] WraithGear@lemmy.world -1 points 1 year ago

That is not persuasive to me really that they would have liability. But ultimately i don’t have to be convinced of anything. Its the instance owner to do as they wish. I think its the wrong call, and premature in the extreme. So do a lot of users. So if this is their decision then it will just come with disappointed posts and down votes and a little less engagement is all.

[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win -3 points 1 year ago

Let's take the inflammatory subject solely to make a point.

If someone posted CP to !disney_pictures@lemmy.xyz, that content is then immediately copied to every instance that has at least one subscriber to !disney_pictures@lemmy.xyz. It now appears on NEW of the community and the front page of every single one of those instances. It's not a link to the content, it's the actual content, hosted on every single once of those instances.

You not convinced there's the potential for liability for every single one of those instances and their admins?

[-] AllukaTheCutie7725@lemmy.world 2 points 1 year ago

All the people here comparing CSAM and Piracy clearly don't understand how severe CSAM is compared to piracy, that or they're making an obvious strawman to attempt to derail the conversation because they can't actually make any good arguments.

Here's the short version because I've already explained the difference:

CSAM is sexual material depicting children, it is one of the most disgusting and heinous crimes there are.

Piracy is Copyright infringement and is typically a civil matter, in some cases it may turn criminal but is not and cannot be compared to CSAM material in terms of severity, and attempting to do so is dishonest and disgusting (it shows you lack understanding of the severity of CSAM as a crime).

Also FYI I said it earlier in another thread but dbzer0 doesn't allow links or content to be hosted there which renders the whole content federation argument dead in the water since there is no links to pirated material or hosted pirated material that would get copied over here though activitypub Read their rules or shut up, any continued arguments about the content federation problem are either based on lies or hypothetical scenarios that aren't happening and thus aren't relevant.

[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win -1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

You're missing the forest through the trees if your take is that anyone is directly comparing the severity of these two issues. The point is that any instance owner that doesn't have the proper framework in place to mount a legal argument or defense is in a highly vulnerable position regardless of the content.

Being in the right doesn't matter if you can't afford the price tag associated with proving it. Just responding to a subpoena or a lawsuit has a non-zero cost associated with it.

[-] Bubonic@lemmy.dbzer0.com 2 points 1 year ago

You not convinced there’s the potential for liability for every single one of those instances and their admins?

No.

[-] muddybulldog@mylemmy.win 3 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Not sure which part of that law you're going with but I appreciate the arrogance of quoting US law as a silver bullet on a global platform in a thread started on a server in Germany.

[-] mitchacho74@lemmy.world 1 points 1 year ago

With federation, the content is shared between servers, that's the act of federation. It downloads the posts from the other instance. So it would then be stored on lemmy.world, the only way to stop that is to defederate. The mobile apps mostly solve this problem as you can view content from lemmy.world and choose to add other instances, but the browser version isn't setup to work that way, so it's less than perfect, but it's supposed to be easy for this content to exist all on its own and only show to other users in a single place when they want that. So if the admin team is afraid the largest community on a small and growing platform won't have the means to fight a legal battle no matter if it is legal or not (I've been hearing a lot of legals), I get their reaction. hell reddit could easily target and crush Lemmy.world in court if they wanted to kill the platform. It isn't much work as unfortunate as it is to go to that instance for that content