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
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
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
Same as !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.
Yes, you are repeating exactly why this is concerning to users, and why I’m personally no longer on lemmy.world. It can’t be trusted.
What would be the alternative?
Moving the instance behind Tor and hoping to never get identified?
As long as you’re operating a service on the internet you’ll be bound by laws in one place or another. The only thing you can do against this is trying to avoid being identified and therefore trying to evade prosecution. This is not a legal defense.
Actually questioning the validity of a claim before proceeding to give in, for starters. Maybe seeking legal help from one of the many advocates out there.
If the response is an immediate white flag being raised, then anyone who posts on lemmy.world who has any semblance of risk now or in the future is fully at risk with lemmy.world. How is that assertion wrong?
Does ‘not immediately folding under even the slightest request’ require tor?
Does communication publicly before a decision with large implications like this require tor or hiding your identity?
We do question the validity of claims, but when it comes to takedowns of copyright related content, we simply do not have the resources to throw money at lawyers to evaluate this in detail. We can apply common sense to determine if something appears to be a reasonable request, but we can’t pay a lawyer to evaluate every single request. We also can’t afford going to court over every case, even if we were to win, because those processes take large amounts of personal time and have a risk of significant penalties.
Legal advocates on Lemmy or any other platform for that matter are not a substitution for legal council.
I don’t believe I made any claim that a legal advocate on Lemmy is a substitute for legal council.
I said there are advocates out there. There are law groups which focus on open source software and community run services who pay for that work by either the ability for that group to pay on a sliding scale, or completely pro bono as it’s supported in the back end by corporate clientele or other similar services. But that’s a complete digression.
Just being candid here - I haven’t seen that. In this post or any other by admins. Obviously this could be entirely behind closed doors, but even then, none of that has been communicated here has it?
And on the basis that no real effort to push back here has been visible, why would any other risk category be any different? Why would someone who could be persecuted want to risk themselves with lemmy.world?
I think the position has been clear, and entirely the decision of Lemmy.world. I’m just being clear about why that creates a trust issue.