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.
[email protected]
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.
[email protected]
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. @[email protected], 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.
[email protected]
Same as [email protected].
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.
You must log in or register to comment.
Not cool, reverse this
So you had plenty of time to make a decision, and follow through with it by banning multiple communities. But offering an explanation it’s all “we’re all volunteers and we’re too busy for this shit!”. Nice.
I knew this announcement was coming and I’d figured this action would have come from an admin who wasn’t aware of the previous context.
It’s actually hilarious 🍿
I just love the idea that an admin would take action without communicating with literally anyone else on the team, and that be a totally normal and okay thing.
The execution should have been better, but the decision itself was a team decision, not an individual admin decision without talking to the rest of the team.
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.
yeah, as long as you don’t specifically point to a copyright infringing content things will be fine. that’s why all piracy related subreddits are still not taken down.
Must be exhausting having this problem with LW twice now. Can’t make this shit up at this point. Lol
And this is why lemmy will never get close to what reddit was. On top of the cumbersome registration process and difficulty of navigating the fediverse for the non-tech people, there is also the issue of de-federation and censorship. This is no better then reddit unfortunately. It makes me sad, this really seemed like a good idea, but the implementation is so poor.
People were saying it won’t matter what instance you choose, everything is federated and you choose what you want to see, but clearly the instance admins make that choice for you and it absolutely does matter the instance you choose.
deleted by creator
Take lessons from my previous unremoval announcement and undo this. This is really stupid
I do not believe that this decision has been made in good faith and is against the wishes of the community
This is on the mod team of the mentioned communities. On no commercial site this crap would fly. On reddit fitgirls site is never mentioned in full for good reason. Crosslinking to pastebin blobs is just formaiity. These communities should be kept clear of any linking.
On reddit fitgirls site is never mentioned in full for good reason.
That’s just false. There’s a direct link in the r/piracy megathread.
On crackwatch people avoided it a lot I think. Might have changed at some point.
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.
What a pathetic response. I am interpreting this as:
We will fold whenever we get a legal request, real or not.
To users on .world, I strongly recommend scrubbing your posts, deleting your account, and then going to a different instance. These admins have proven that they WILL buckle to legal pressure no matter what - that means also giving up user data upon request. Your data is completely accessible by admins. That includes your private messages and unpublished pictures.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few scenarios:
- Being LGBTQIA+ in a country where its illegal to be
- Consuming content from websites not approved by the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
- Disparaging the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
- Activism discussion (eg. extinction rebellion, antifa, the auntie network)
- Right to repair in countries where its illegal to circumvent device DRM to perform repairs
I’ve deleted my account there because that TOS and so-called privacy policy are complete and utter trash.
That includes your private messages
Those messages are not private, there is a disclaimer about it every time you write one
Which is why we should refer to them as “DMs” or “direct messages”.
@[email protected], this is my concern right here.
Thanks for running things, but I can’t recommend people use lemmy.world at this point.
Lemmy.World is legally primarily bound by the countries listed here.
If we get a request, of course we will evaluate that request.
When it comes to taking down content, such as copyright infringing content, we may err on the side of caution to reduce the legal risk we’re exposing ourselves to.
When it comes to handing over data that is not already publicly accessible, such as (not-really-)private messages or IP addresses of users, we will not “err on the side of caution” and hand out data to everyone, but we must follow the laws that we’re operating under. See also https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/#4-when-and-with-whom-do-we-share-your-personal-information.
looks like I be spinning up my own private instance to not have to deal with de-federations or anything like that.
ahhh feels refreshing! untill i got my own instance running but hey I might just stay
Yarr harr harr welcome on board jolly
Might as well ban Lemmy.ml under rules 1, 2, 4, and 5.1 if you’re going to start enforcing your rules.
Whilst I completely understand why you, as private individuals with limited income and not a huge org that has high priced legal teams on call, have made this decision (I think people forget that it costs money just to defend yourself in court, irrespective of how accurate or legal the charges might be), this is about the 3rd or 4th time that the Admin team have communicated and taken action very, very poorly.
It’s really not a difficult thing to do. A post such as this either before or immediately after taking such important actions. I realise you’re all busy people with real life stuff to do too but surely you tell new Admin’s when they’re onboarded that momentous decisions that affect a lot of people must be communicated to the members immediately?
Yeah, we’re sorry for the lag. We did post post a few hours later, as we’re all in different timezones.
I understand that, but surely the Admin who took the action isn’t in a different timezone form themselves? What was stopping them immediately posting just before or just after taking the action?
Thank you for your hard work. I feel that a delay of a few hours is acceptable for a voluntary service. I am sure there are many commercial services which have much worse communication.
I personally feel that being able to discuss piracy but banning communities that have links that actively promote piracy seems like a sensible safe legal position. This is probably what I would do if there was even a possibility I might be legally liable for an instance.
I can understand users frustration but I don’t think it’s fair to take it out on the admins. It is a thankless task which people do to benefit their community. The great thing with the fediverse is that you have other low cost options to turn to if an instance no longer works for you.
