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.
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.
Well, it’s more that we believe a domain root url embedded in an image, or a link to a rentry doesn’t really have any risks. At least, nothing likely to get us sued. Note that all these domain links existed (and still exist) in the reddit /r/piracy wiki for years without problems.
The reason being that almost all of these takedowns are coming from automated crawlers, who won’t bother OCR every image they come across, or b64-decoding every string.
I’m unhappy with this decision and don’t support it.
Well you see, since Lemmy.world is a large instance, the vast majority of the Lemmy network actually. Such decisions ultimately affect everyone else because they slash your engagement severely in all affected communities.
So even on other instances the decisions of a behemoth like lemmy.world can still affect users there, in way more indirect and annoying ways.
Ok I can see that secondary impact. This is the reality is unless someone else is willing to run a big instance and accept the legal risk. To everyone complaining: first are you even donating to your instance, and second, willing to give a lot more $$$ to support them if there was a legal problem. I doubt they would.
Again. Really? 🤦♂️
Yup, and this time it seems like they’re getting more support from the community than downvotes (or they’re upvoting their own post).
Its currently in the negative, so I don’t think the support is there. Just early upvotes.
Just early upvotes.
I was a bit worried because those early votes had a very large positive ratio and that could mean a very drastic culture shift since the last one of these posts, which obviously wouldn’t bode well, not just for Lemmy.world but for interactions from it as well on other instances.
This is where the benefit of having more than one account on different instances comes in. When admins make a move users don’t like, users can just log into a different instance to access the content they want to see.
Honestly though, not very good optics on doing this without any prior communication. You are going to do whatever you want on your instance, but as IIRC the biggest Lemmy instance, its a really bad look to be making changes without saying anything. It makes me (and likely others) wonder if you hadn’t been called out on it by some users posting about it if there would even have been an announcement like this at all. Granted, there is no legal obligation for transparency, but many users here greatly appreciate the transparency in the past that was done prior to taking action for the most part.
Side note: Going to go out on a limb here and assume the content takedown request was Nintendo related, and the takedown request was probably filed by someone who does not actually represent Nintendo. This happens so often that it is basically my default assumption. This may or may not be the case here, but its hard to imagine that there would be anyone else with their eyes on such a tiny community as Lemmy, especially in comparison to Reddit.
When it comes to linking to content, it’s essential to understand that simply providing a link does not equate to sharing the actual content. Each URL on the Megathread serves the specific purpose of leading users in a particular direction.
If this practice is deemed negative, then one could argue that every search engine operates erroneously. Search engines display results and guide users to specific destinations, mirroring the functionality of our approach to linking.
I suspect lemmy.world doesn’t have the time, money, or patience to deal with the potential lawsuit or legal actions to required to defend that argument.
But the communities are hosted on .ml and dbzer0 not on World. So .ml and dbzer0 will be the ones in legal trouble.
This is an untested legal question. The way federation works is that the content is hosted on Lemmy.world servers by virtue of being federated. The only way to not have the content hosted locally is to block those communities.
Lemmy.world didn’t develop the federation standard and didn’t put the content up in the first place, but takedown requests and lawsuits traditionally targets content hosts, not necessarily the specific offending party who used the host. Sites avoid legal liability by policing their content, which Lemmy.world did in this case.
I personally still think it’s shitty because fuck the man and all, but I get it. It’s not my ass on the line, it’s theirs.
