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.
Surely there is a discussion to be had around what is and isn’t allowed, there are plenty of subreddits discussing piracy without dolirect links that are playing within the rules.
Especially because discussing copies of your own data also happens in such communities. There must be clear guidelines what can and cannot be discussed. Also, it would have been nice to have those communities selfregulate. For example, giving them 30 days to comply, e.g. removing any content that breaks the law.
Because the fediverse i about democracy. If laws stand in the way of democracy since they have been brought up by governments influenced by global corporations (which are by definition autocratic) then they must be ignored.
So, striking a balance to not get anyone in trouble while not working for IP holders is the way.
Because the fediverse i about democracy.
Isn’t it, like, the opposite? With the main assumption being that you should find an instance that aligns with your interests and values, not find an instance and try to vote for it to become something you like? That is technically “voting with your feet” but instances don’t actually need a large population to stay running.
It’s only about democracy if you make your own instance. Otherwise, you have to follow the rules of wherever you’re signed up.
Sure. But we’re a group of volunteers and we would not like to find out the hard way what is possible and what not. We would think meta discussions about piracy should be allowed as long as there is no linking to actual illegal content.
But is pointing to locations with illegal content legal or not? And having members/admins worldwide it makes it even harder to be sure.
We don’t want to find out the hard way and this is a better safe than sorry measure. Again we personally have nothing against the people on these communities or against the communities itself.
should go ahead and ban image uploading to lemmy.world, as there is likely a ton of illegal, copyright-violating content that hasn’t been stress-tested for fair use.
Smart, might as well shut down this whole thread then as we’re discussing piracy here too, right?
