189
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.
Is that really the case though? They are saying they didn’t want to risk legal troubles which sounds reasonable to me considering they’re just your average people with a hobby.
They’re not risking legal troubles unless they receive and don’t comply with a DMCA takedown request. Like I said elsewhere, this is about making their site friendly to advertisers.
Dealing with DMCA takedown requests is a hassle, even if you never get charged with anything. I can understand them deciding not to bother with that. As long as they realize that in the process they’re not bothering with a certain portion of the userbase, who will move elsewhere to see the content they want to see. That’s easy on the Fediverse.
This community and other Lemmy piracy communities generally all ban direct linking. If there are no direct links, what is there to DMCA takedown request for?
Lemmy.world wants to put ads on their site. There isn’t a good, rational explanation for this because all of the piracy communities already have fucking rules in place for this. Check the sidebar here. Rule 3!
Nothing for legitimate DMCA takedowns to be sent about. That won’t stop DMCAs from being filed anyway, and those DMCAs will each need to be checked to see whether something slipped through the community’s rules.
This basically means that even though the instance admins aren’t mods on the piracy community, they will still end up being on the hook for doing moderation work on that community. It’s understandable that some instance admins will say “nah, don’t want to do that.”
If that bothers you, switch to a different instance.
You can make a DMCA request for whatever you want. Even if it’s BS the onus of proof falls on the instance not the DMCA sender. Large social media platforms like YouTube and Reddit have agreements with large copyright holders to deal with their complaints out of court but there is no way any Lemmy instance has that.
They’re hosted in Finland. Is Finland required to follow US laws or respond to legal requests made under US laws? Pretty sure the answer is a resounding fucking NO.