Removal of piracy communities

Hello world!

Some of you will already have noticed that we have removed some piracy related communities from Lemmy.World during the last day.

Lack of communication

First off, we want to address the lack of communication.

Not everyone in our current admin team has been with us long enough to be aware of the previous issues and discussions related to these communities and the impact this has on our community.

We should absolutely have published this announcement when or before we removed the communities, not hours later. After realizing this mistake, we would have liked to write this a lot earlier already, but we were all busy with irl things, that we just didn’t have time for it.

Lemmy.World is run by volunteers on their personal time, nobody here gets paid for what we do.

Removed communities

Next, we want to explain how we got to the decision to remove these communities.

`[!crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com)`

A lot of the recent content posted to this community included images instructing users to visit a specific website to obtain a copy of the release that the post is about. These instructions were in the form of Type in Google: visit-this.domain. The domain referenced in these posts is entirely focused on video game piracy and providing people with access to copyright infringing material.

While there may be legal differences between whether one is linking to specific content on a domain or just linking to the domain itself, such as linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy compared to linking to https://en.wikipedia.org/, we do not consider this to be clear enough in laws and previous lawsuits that linking to just the domain is acceptable, if that domain is primarily about distributing copyright infringing material. We therefore do not allow linking to such domains. Additionally, we do not see a significant difference between posting a link directly to a website and embedding said link in an image, so we treat them equally.

`[!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com)`

This community is, for the most part, just about discussing various topics related to piracy. We do not at all mind discussion about this topic, and if it had been limited to that, this community would be fine.

This community, however, contains a pinned Megathread post by a community moderator, which, through a few levels of a pastebin-like site, provides an aggregated overview of various sources of content. Some of these sources are entirely legal content, but it intentionally includes various other references, such as the website referred to from the CrackWatch community, which are primarily intended for copyright infringement.

lemmy.dbzer0.com is willing to accept this content on their instance, as well as the potential legal risk coming from this, which they’re free to do.

We do not plan to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com, but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating copyright infringement. @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com, the admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com, is a great person, and we have no problems with him as a person. This is just a matter of different risk tolerance.

`[!piracy@lemmy.ml](/c/piracy@lemmy.ml)`

Same as [!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com](/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com).

Why have the piracy communities been restored previously? What changed?

Currently, based on the memories of team members involved in the decision back then, it appears that there was a misunderstanding between the community moderators and Lemmy.World admins in how the community will be moderated going forward, as well as which types of content are allowed.

Lemmy.World expected/assumed that links to websites primarily focused on facilitating distribution of pirated content would be disallowed in these communities.

The community moderators however do tolerate references to such websites, as long as people are not linking to individual content directly.

We suspect that this may have been missed during our original review when restoring the communities, which lead us to previously restoring these communities.

Why now?

We have recently received a takedown request for content not directly related to these communities, but it prompted us to review other piracy related content and communities.

Terms of Service clarification

Last, as we’ve reviewed our Terms of Service, we have updated our wording here to make it more clear what is and what isn’t allowed when it comes to piracy. This was already covered by "Do not post illegal content of any type. Do not engage in any activity that may […] facilitate or provide access to illegal transactions" in section 4, but we have now added section 4.1 to better explain this.

We apologize for the delays in communication.

(page 2) 50 comments

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[-] clueless_stoner@feddit.nl 9 points 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago)

Take lessons from my previous unremoval announcement and undo this. This is really stupid

[-] istanbullu@lemmy.ml 8 points 6 months ago

I regret having donated to you guys, you do not deserve it.

I moved to a new instance, and happier for it. I recommend others doing the same. lemmy.world is run in a way that makes reddit look nice.

[-] fatalError@lemmy.sdf.org 8 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

And this is why lemmy will never get close to what reddit was. On top of the cumbersome registration process and difficulty of navigating the fediverse for the non-tech people, there is also the issue of de-federation and censorship. This is no better then reddit unfortunately. It makes me sad, this really seemed like a good idea, but the implementation is so poor.

People were saying it won't matter what instance you choose, everything is federated and you choose what you want to see, but clearly the instance admins make that choice for you and it absolutely does matter the instance you choose.

[-] MigratingtoLemmy@lemmy.world 7 points 8 months ago

I do not believe that this decision has been made in good faith and is against the wishes of the community

[-] L0wded_@sh.itjust.works 6 points 9 months ago

the piracy community in lemmy.ml i can agree with the removal of, all of the others don't make any sense.

[-] ms_lane@lemmy.world 4 points 5 months ago

Overreach and how the Lemmy.world admins became /u/spez

[-] Fiivemacs@lemmy.ca 2 points 9 months ago

I bet Zuckerberg asked for the content to be removed and you're just cleaning house before he takes over.

[-] Koof_on_the_Roof@lemmy.world 0 points 9 months ago

Thank you for your hard work. I feel that a delay of a few hours is acceptable for a voluntary service. I am sure there are many commercial services which have much worse communication.

I personally feel that being able to discuss piracy but banning communities that have links that actively promote piracy seems like a sensible safe legal position. This is probably what I would do if there was even a possibility I might be legally liable for an instance.

I can understand users frustration but I don’t think it’s fair to take it out on the admins. It is a thankless task which people do to benefit their community. The great thing with the fediverse is that you have other low cost options to turn to if an instance no longer works for you.

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