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.
Stop blocking things. Piracy is ethical
You gonna pay for their lawyers to fight that fight?
If you’re going to ban piracy you should also ban all pro copyright communities and comments, it’s only fair.
lemmy.world has become reddit.
Yeeeep. I stopped using my LW account once you people simped to Facebook federation.
Definitely think you should allow them again. Obviously not on your instance but restricting access to other instances is just not right. I do understand the concern though, I really hope in the end you realllow them.
Please make announcements on lemmy instead of exclusively on discord moving forward. That is the biggest issue here, the lack of public transparency. Such a decision affects all instances, not just lemmy.world and making it publicly known is important
This was a misunderstanding from one of the team members. It has since been discussed and will not happen again. Lemmy.World and this announcement community is our primary platform,
Speaking of removed communities, can an admin respond to this please: https://lemmy.world/post/3165787
Thank you for this
Thank you. It is appreciated.
Misunderstanding eh?
Yeah. You misunderstood that they are liars.
Aged like milk.
Just another misunderstanding bro
Are we raising posts from the dead?
These communities are not even hosted on lemmy.world, this is an absurdly overreacted response. There were no signs of any legal trouble and I can’t understand how lemmy.world specifically would be the target of such legal action. If you want to host an instance, you should do everything in your power to allow discussions on any topic, while in necessary cases disallowing direct posting/linking of illegal content. Instead, you chose to block a community that has long been known to avoid having any trouble with the moderators.
And on top of this, the removals were done following the request from a troll account, by a user involved in far more questionable discussions than the legal discussions currently going on in the now-removed communities. Should no attempt be made to differentiate between a legit legal concern and trolling?
Good ol’ Bungiefan_ak, creating troll accounts on any instance that’ll have them to troll all things piracy and post transphobic and hateful shit wherever they go.
What is it about Destiny that attracts pieces of shit?
The ad hominem criticism is irrelevant. The communities should be removed or not removed based on the server’s policies regardless of who first raised the question.
It’s not ad hominem to say someone is acting in bad faith.
Preemptive strike
aka shoot and ask questions later
Doesn’t matter if they are hosted here or not. The way federation works is that threads on different instances are cached locally.
We have NO issues with the people at db0 - we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more. As mentioned in the OP we would like to unblock as soon as we know we can not get in any legal trouble.
Soo ultimately you personally will be the only person determining what people can and can’t see, based on your perception alone. You don’t like something, you’ll ban it. You worry about something, you’ll ban it. And there won’t be a trace without you saying “we banned something”. Which means there are no checks at all to you powertripping in the future. How is this supposed to be free, open and general then? This is even worse than reddit was.
Feel free to contractually agree to pay all their legal fees, in that case.
I feel like there should be a major distinction between caching remote content and hosting that content yourself. Does Cloudflare get in trouble every time the FBI seizes a site that used Cloudflare routing, CDN, or caching? Not as far as I’m aware.
“we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more.”
This is an unfortunate aspect of individuals/small groups housing the fediverse vs big companies. Big companies have lawyers and the capital to back them, individuals do not.
If I was in your shoes, I’d do the same thing. I appreciate your wish for thus to be temporary. I hope you will share your findings once you come to a final decision; information like this is relevant to all those managing servers.
What needs to happen for you to be confident you won’t get in legal trouble, and thus unblock them? Change on the db0 side? Lemmy.world admins getting legal representation/advice? Something else? I’m curious how you all see this playing it out in the future.
Highly doubt there’s anything db0 can do. lemmy.world is in Europe, piracy has hefty legal ramifications.
Like you could argue that it isn’t piracy all you want, but if faced with the possibility of your hobby landing you decades in prison and millions in debt, would you do it?
Just create an account at db0, this really isn’t the big deal people make it out to be.
It would be preferable if you would lie less. Evil pirate uploads potentially_infringing.mp3 to to filehost. Filehost actually serves potentially_infringing.mp3, a community on db0 hosts a link to potentially_infringing.mp3, lemmy.world caches locally a copy of data from db0. Of those the one guy directly uploading the information is at risk of an extremely unlikely single digit thousands of dollars.
Nobody not even evil pirate himself is at risk of decades in prison or millions in debt. Companies responsibility basically ends at taking stuff down when specifically notified of infringing content.
Not all of Europe. In most parts (especially Eastern Europe) the most you will get is a slap on the wrist if you are really really unlucky. And decades in prison aren’t a thing anywhere for simply sharing links to pirated content.
No one thinks of Eastern Europe as European beyond geography, excepting perhaps Eastern Europeans themselves.
Prison notwithstanding, financial ruin is a definite possibility.
People are making a mountain out of a molehill over this. The instance owner doesn’t want to risk any legal issues over hosting this instance, and I get that. Just create an account on db0 and use that. It’s not a big deal.
Instance admin isn’t some big corporation trying to silence your free speech. He’s just a dude that doesn’t want his hobby to bite him in the arse.
I don’t think I ever heard of a case where somebody has been condemned for piracy in Italy; I also know plenty of people who torrents/stream, yet none who uses a VPN to do so.
In Germany though, afaik, they are quite insane with their anti-piracy laws.
Discussing piracy isn’t illegal. It would be one thing if they were hosting pirated content, but they don’t even link to anything.
If that were to change I’d understand the decision, but this just seems silly to me.
We have NO issues with the people at db0 - we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more. As mentioned in the OP we would like to unblock as soon as we know we can not get in any legal trouble.
Words are empty, offers are void in Nebraska. You already took steps against people who simply mostly discuss piracy. What concrete steps can you take now to show that you’d actually unblock “as soon as we know”?
Well, caching content is not the same as copying it. The major difference in the court would be that caching is automatic - and as such you are not in complete responsibility of what it is you copied. If you do everything in your power to comply with any DMCA notices, then I couldn’t realistically see lemmy.world being targeted. This is an analogous situation to eg. accidentally opening a website containing illegal content. Sure, your computer did download the contents to the RAM, but what matters is that you acted in good faith and did not attempt to get the contents, it just happened in the process of browsing the web and as such you could not reasonably expect to receive such content.
Something that’s getting lost in this conversation is the nature of the infringement and what that means to the copyright holder. Memes could be considered a form of infringement, however in practice they often serve as free publicity. The intent is not to deprive the copyright holder of revenue, but use the medium to express themselves. Exposure increases, and so does the likelihood of revenue from the conversion of new fans.
This changes with public conversations of piracy, because the nature of those conversations drift into how to deprive and evade the copyright holder by providing users just enough information to find pirated content. From a legal standpoint this can be used to prove aiding and abetting, a crime that be considered equal or an accessory to depending on the jurisdiction.
The admins are aware of how Lemmy’s content caching works, and now publicly acknowledge the existence of their federation with dbzer0; whose piracy communities are its strongest asset. Any defense of ignorance is out the door. Without banning the communities LW becomes an accessory if dbzer0 becomes liable, as would any other instance who caches dbzer0’s c/piracy.
To those who still disagree, that’s fine. Open your password manager, make some new accounts on other instances, enjoy the lemmyverse. But you have to agree that it is unreasonable to demand you hold the evidence of my crimes because it would inconvenience me otherwise.
Better defederate from all instances then.
Better to create your own instance then.
It’s about reducing risk not eradicating it and there’s a huge difference in risk in being targeted for legal action due to hosting c/piracy (via caching/mirroring) than from a single piracy post in c/hellokitty.
Well, caching content is not the same as copying it.
A cache is literally a local copy.
Fighting legal challenges requires lawyers, even if you are in the right. Lawyers are crazy expensive.
Unless I’m missing something, you don’t need a lawyer to take down a post that you’ve received a DMCA removal request on.
as far as i have seen (as a subscriber to c/piracy) there is no links to pirated content and they are very clear that that is not allowed
the vast majority of the discussion is on morals of piracy, anti piracy measures, etc etc
The great thing is, now you’re 100% empowered to move forward and host the responsibility yourself. Demanding volunteers shoulder potential liability (when you yourself admit you can’t understand how there’s any in the first place) is juvenile.
The moment a volunteer is hit with a DMCA notice or any threat of legal action, you think they have any interest in going through the court system? You can do it first.
I think you don’t understand what a DMCA notice actually is. The whole point of it is to give you a chance to remove offending content. The “threat” of legal action won’t actually result in anything, provided you comply, and that is exactly why I do not understand the preemptive actions, when there is basically no such thing as immediate legal threat in case of DMCA notices. The copyright holders often do not want to go through the court system either and will gladly accept pre-legal-action compliance.
The power of the panopticon lies not in being able to see and punish all deviant activity, but to encourage self-correction in all potential deviants who must always assume they are being watched.
You seem to know your way around the law then, so please be the change you want to see in this world. Host a piracy instance and show everyone here that we were wrong and that the admins were just overreacting.
I can openly admit I am breaking the law for example by using torrents for piracy - and I seed as much as I can, though it in theory makes me liable. So yes, I am the change I want to see - piracy should be free to discuss everywhere
You can go further: host a piracy instance since you seem confident enough and prove us wrong. Why are you avoiding this part? I’m not the only one having suggested this to you.
And here you are (after fighting with docker for an hour) http://pankuleczka.ydns.eu/
I take back what I said then and I commend you for putting money where your mouth is and I hope you know what you’re doing. That’s something that the others are not willing to do but feel entitled to expect from LW because it’s not their necks on the noose.
good thing I followed the advice not to use lemmy.world lol
Which instance is recommended?
not entirely sure, I’m still new here. I haven’t had any problems with lemm.ee
there’s probably a thread in [email protected] where people discuss the pros and cons of different instances
Thank you. I hope somebody can chime in and give me the instance to use.
Indeed
Pathetic
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.
If you make your own instance, as a one-man thing, then it’s not really democracy at all either. The only way it would be democracy is if you made your own instance and specifically said “all decisions will be made via vote” and you actually had users around to participate in those votes.
Your instance is your vote in the fediverse as a whole.
A vote for what, though? What is being decided, and by who?
You are deciding what content you want to see. If you’re on an instance run by someone else, that will never be under your control.
Yes. The thing is there is zero content breaking the law, so they would have looked ridiculous
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.
The music community could be an issue for the same reason, this logic is problematic
Smart, might as well shut down this whole thread then as we’re discussing piracy here too, right?
I love Piracy!
I don’t understand why people are upset even a little about this. This is a prefect advert for the fediverse. If you are not completely happy with an instance(which can never realistically happen) then you just host your own or have multiple accounts. Apps have this built in and easily accessible. Why do people want to concentrate everything they want into one instance? What if that instance goes down? This should not be hated or applauded… just ignored as the way the fediverse should work. Don’t get too attached to any single instance.
This sort for reminds me of a Sybil attack.
I think it’s a good idea for everyone to register at an obscure Lemmy instance. If everyone’s on lemmy.world, it isn’t truly federated.
Reddit allows piracy communities. These Lemmy communities aren’t hosted on your servers. That’s the whole thing - dbzer0.com and lemmy.ml are taking the risks, though there probably aren’t many risks in the first place.
You’re not allowed to discuss piracy. You wouldn’t talk about stealing a car would you?
Delete this.
You are allowed to discuss piracy. You aren’t allowed to facilitate piracy (I.e. providing links to pirated content). It is illegal in the country where this instance is hosted.
That community never linked to pirated content, you goose
Except for the times when it did, shown above complete with screenshots.
You mean that screenshot showing the one instance of it ever happening? It broke the rules of the community and was taken down.
is this the new most downvoted post on lemmy?
And still people are crying about this.
You can literally change to another instance. That’s the entire point of the Fediverse. If you don’t like a decision the admin has taken, you can move elsewhere.
The entitlement of some people these days is ridiculous.
The fuck are you talking about? Most sane people go “Damn, this thing I like is now doing a thing I don’t like. I’m going to let them know and hopefully enough people agree to change it back.” but people like you with full fedi brain go “Whelp, this instance has a mod whose name contains two letter U’s in it, better change instances.”
You’ve watered down what the word entitlement so much I’m starting to doubt you ever knew what it meant. Entitlement is demanding your preference be catered to for the sake of it, community is giving feedback on what makes sense and what doesn’t. A general, all-purpose instance shouldn’t ban content except in extreme cases like they themselves state, which is illegal content. Piracy is not illegal, it’s ambiguous. Communities about piracy are not illegal and are infinitely more legal than the act of piracy.
This action makes very little sense when looked at sensibly and rather than hopscotch around instances like your mom in an all-male sorority I think we should give feedback to make an instance better before discarding it carelessly like a used condom in that same all-male sorority.
Bro the fuck YOU talking about?
What would convince anyone to blindly accept liability for 100k users on a volunteer basis? If you owned the servers and your name was on the line, would you feel comfortable hosting “ambiguous” (your words) material?
Your tone echos the people that yell at FOSS devs on GitHub. You are the entitled one. It’s hilarious, you think you’re entitled to random people accepting liability on your behalf.
Friendly reminder 4chan has an entire board dedicated to posting magnet links to torrents as well as guides on how to use them in rare cases. On the clearnet. For everyone. If you don’t want to be a magnet link directory, fine, that’s an understandable position. Ban communities that allow magnet links. It is sheer paranoia to ban a community that merely engages in the discussion of piracy and related content and banning swaths of content on a general purpose instance defeats the entire point of ‘general purpose’.
But again, telling on yourself not knowing what the fuck entitled means. You’re seven layers of stupid treating piracy like it’s fucking CP.
Ratio.
Also lol at using 4chan as your example of how to run a site
Lemmy world clearly stated that they were not a “free speech” zone, that they would have rules, you joined anyway
This kid just said Ratio. Bro go back to your Twitter echo chamber, I’ve never given a shit if my opinions are popular, I care if they’re right.
By all means, be the most popular idiot you can be. None of what I’m advocating for is ‘free speech’ you lemming, it’s the contradiction of a ‘general purpose’ instance to ban content out of preference and masquerade it as legal liability. It’s not illegal (in the United States) so if it’s based there (which it likely is but I’m open to being wrong), it doesn’t break the rules even though they claim it is and does. So either they’re lying or are misinformed and according to Hanlon’s razor, one should never attribute to malice what can be sufficiently be explained by stupidity.
So to recap It’s not illegal. It shouldn’t be banned. I hope the admins change their mind. Take your ratio and hang it up on the fridge for your mom.
