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.

  • @[email protected]
    16•2 years ago

    I don’t begrudge your decision. To me this comes down to a question of if you’re willing to be on the hook for a multi million dollar lawsuit, even if you’d definitely win in the end. It’s still an expensive process.

    I sure as hell am not willing to do that, so I’m not going judge other people who aren’t willing either. I wish more people would look at it from this perspective.

    By design, this isn’t Reddit. We didn’t want to be at the whims of their bullshit CEO and corporation. Unfortunately, that’s also exactly who can afford to have legal squabbles and not go bankrupt. This is just a natural consequence of having a community run space vs a corporate one.

  • @[email protected]
    58•2 years ago

    You’re not allowed to discuss piracy. You wouldn’t talk about stealing a car would you?

    Delete this.

  • @[email protected]English
    40•2 years ago

    I kinda do understand their stance, it sucks but its better than having to deal with legal shit.

  • PropaGandalfEnglish
    31•2 years ago

    Not with me. Pirating for personal use is perfectly legal in my country.

    Do we have an account migration tool yet and can somebody recommend a nice instance?

  • @[email protected]English
    260•2 years ago

    Uh, @[email protected] … what’s up with the banning going on in this thread? I noticed on a.lemmy.org that someone was labeled “banned” and their comment was simply “Ight, I’m out”

    The mod note was “Let us help you”.

    There are more similarly weak (spiteful?) bans that certainly don’t seem to be at a standard for a ban. “Litterally 1984” was another one. Is that all it takes to be banned here?

    Edit: Many (all?) the users I referenced as banned are now unbanned from the site, but now banned from this community.

  • CamEnglish
    0•2 years ago

    Thanks for only banning the communities and not the entire instance as a whole. That is a much healthier approach to deferation.

  • @[email protected]English
    5•2 years ago

    Mind linking this number one rule you’re speaking of? The code of conduct I find just talks about ut harassment.

    We are committed to providing a friendly, safe and welcoming environment for all, regardless of level of experience, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, personal appearance, body size, race, ethnicity, age, religion, nationality, or other similar characteristic.

    Found this page on censorship, how does this fit in?

    https://join-lemmy.org/docs/users/05-censorship-resistance.html

  • @[email protected]
    154•2 years ago

    What part is illegal? Are they sharing files on that instance and your instance re-hosts it?

    From my understanding, discussions are legal, guides are legal, tips are legal, but actual files (aka “copyrighted content”) is illegal. There are no files shared there, links at maximum, but institutions should be after those content-sharing websites, not forums.

    I am against this decision and I am happy that I am not part of admins team.