Removal of piracy communities
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.
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I'm curious what is believed to be the "legal issues". From my understanding lemmy.world isn't hosting any of this content it is all on other (previously) federated sites.
I'm glad this finally got posted, but really believe that this should have been publicly brought up before action was taken, not as an after thought.
Admins, you are doing a great job and it's very reassuring that you are willing to grow with the community.
My understanding is that the federated nature means that l.w retains some amount of data of the instances they federate with. They are probably concerned that some is more than none and that's the liability
You are incorrect. They get a copy of the data from all other instances, store it locally, and host it for all of the local users. If a local user comments on it, the comment is stored locally and pushed back to the original instance and all other instances. They have no control over the content and can't moderate it locally unless the community is local.
You are talling about cached content. I find this to be a silly argument. When data is transfered on the internet cached copies of that data exist in many places in between the source and the consumption. Cached copies are not a target of dmca and if they do become targets, fringe social media instances will be low on the list of priorities...
There's a difference between a cached content that is unmodified from the original copy and what happens on the fediverse. Here, each instance has a cache and it is modified and pushed back out to all other instances. The original post is cached, but not any comments made through .world. That's the key point.