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.
I can still access r piracy on Reddit, i thought lemmy.world had more freedom of speech than corporate sellouts. ๐
Reddit has more lawyers
Totally not the point. Reddit is a large company, they have lawyers to defend themselves in prolonged court battles. Lemmy.world is a privately owned hobby project, the owner cannot do that.
Second, and more importantly in this case,
lemmy.world
is in a different country and hence subject to different laws.Yeah i can see the difference in country, can that be changed? Use hosts based in another country? This isn't even for profit
Probably? IANAL, so I don't know how it'd work in particular. But I also don't know the personal state of the
lemmy.world
admins, if it's a hobby project I can imagine that both time and resources are limited to do anything big in regards to tightening legal hatches. If they OTOH have some personal money pool and free time, it's more likely they'd find a better solution in the future.