Yeah, that was a dumb reason, I agree. But I also think it was inevitable with .world being the biggest instance. They’re the first place in Lemmy any corporation will go to if they wanna sue.
There’s nothing to sue? They could go after an instance owner, sure, but I’m reasonably sure that there’s still Section 230 safe harbor protections for “service providers”, which to my knowledge could easily be the owner/admin of a fediverse instance. Perhaps it’ll need to be litigated in the courts, which is unfortunate for whoever gets stuck being the trailblazer.
Each instance owner is running these instances themselves, presumably out of the home, for free.
They could go after an instance owner, sure, but
There’s no “but”. They could fight a lawsuit, sure, but that’s time consuming and expensive, and why bother? The piracy isn’t coming from their instance, why should they have to fight a lawsuit for it? Piracy has its own instance, nothing has been defederated, they’re just not hosting the content on their server to save themselves the hassle down the road. I can’t imagine they’ll be the only one.
Lawsuits don’t generally just throw themselves out. You have to pay a lawyer to show up and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on account of the fact that you don’t host the thing, or whatever the reason is.
Judges don’t go out and do research; if one side’s lawyer says Whirlybird runs The Pirate Bay out of their kitchen and the other side’s lawyer isn’t there, then the court is going to proceed as though that is at least plausible.
So many laws work like this too, it makes them worthless if personal wealth is required to get them enforced. If Section 230 only exists for the wealthy and corporations, the fediverse isn’t gonna get very far
You have to pay a lawyer to show up and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on account of the fact that you don’t host the thing, or whatever the reason is.
You don’t have to pay a lawyer, you can do it yourself.
Sure, but doesn’t it suck that it doesn’t matter what the law says? Do you think it’ll ever change if everyone rolls over and isolates undesirable communities (think beyond piracy to other things like adult content, or content from marginalised groups)
I also just thought that, given how thoroughly downvoted that post and all its OP’s comments were, it makes the Admins of Lemmy.world look like they’ve actively gone against popular opinion. Psychologically, mobs tend to dislike that appearance.
Like, I think people are upset about blocking the piracy communities, sure, but I think that the real issue is that it feels like everyone is just vibing, doing their thing on their lemmy instances, then this troll comes in all fake concerned about breaking rules, gets utterly piled on naturally, only for the admins in question to come in and “side” with the “loser” in people’s eyes.
Yeah, I agree with that. It’s not the blocking that’s such an issue, it’s how they came to decide to do it. Definitely wasn’t handled well. I wonder if the (even more) downtime they’ve been having recently is a result of more people being pissed about this move piling on to the DDOS attacks?
I mentioned earlier or elsewhere on this thread that right now, the narrative that I’m aware of is as follows:
Lemmy.world users: just vibing, doing their thing
Concern troll: comes in with a freshly created account to pearl-clutch about scary illegal things
Lemmy.world users: hahaha look at this loser downvotes them to oblivion, resumes vibing
Lemmy.world Admins: Piracy?! OMG that’s ILLEGAL, thank goodness someone pointed this out to us
If they had an existing stance on piracy, they should have been already enforcing it. Then it wouldn’t look like they were successfully spurred into action by a bad-faith actor.
I think that people are more upset that it was done only after a troll complained about it on the support or admin community.
Yeah, that was a dumb reason, I agree. But I also think it was inevitable with .world being the biggest instance. They’re the first place in Lemmy any corporation will go to if they wanna sue.
There’s nothing to sue? They could go after an instance owner, sure, but I’m reasonably sure that there’s still Section 230 safe harbor protections for “service providers”, which to my knowledge could easily be the owner/admin of a fediverse instance. Perhaps it’ll need to be litigated in the courts, which is unfortunate for whoever gets stuck being the trailblazer.
Each instance owner is running these instances themselves, presumably out of the home, for free.
There’s no “but”. They could fight a lawsuit, sure, but that’s time consuming and expensive, and why bother? The piracy isn’t coming from their instance, why should they have to fight a lawsuit for it? Piracy has its own instance, nothing has been defederated, they’re just not hosting the content on their server to save themselves the hassle down the road. I can’t imagine they’ll be the only one.
They won’t really have to fight a lawsuit because it would just be thrown out if a company tried to file one.
At worst they’d just get DMCA take down requests.
Lawsuits don’t generally just throw themselves out. You have to pay a lawyer to show up and ask the judge to throw out the lawsuit on account of the fact that you don’t host the thing, or whatever the reason is.
Judges don’t go out and do research; if one side’s lawyer says Whirlybird runs The Pirate Bay out of their kitchen and the other side’s lawyer isn’t there, then the court is going to proceed as though that is at least plausible.
So many laws work like this too, it makes them worthless if personal wealth is required to get them enforced. If Section 230 only exists for the wealthy and corporations, the fediverse isn’t gonna get very far
You don’t have to pay a lawyer, you can do it yourself.
True. But then you have to physically show up wherever, and know how to do it right.
Sure, but doesn’t it suck that it doesn’t matter what the law says? Do you think it’ll ever change if everyone rolls over and isolates undesirable communities (think beyond piracy to other things like adult content, or content from marginalised groups)
I also just thought that, given how thoroughly downvoted that post and all its OP’s comments were, it makes the Admins of Lemmy.world look like they’ve actively gone against popular opinion. Psychologically, mobs tend to dislike that appearance.
That’s true. The reasons given were unsatisfyingly vague.
Like, I think people are upset about blocking the piracy communities, sure, but I think that the real issue is that it feels like everyone is just vibing, doing their thing on their lemmy instances, then this troll comes in all fake concerned about breaking rules, gets utterly piled on naturally, only for the admins in question to come in and “side” with the “loser” in people’s eyes.
Yeah, I agree with that. It’s not the blocking that’s such an issue, it’s how they came to decide to do it. Definitely wasn’t handled well. I wonder if the (even more) downtime they’ve been having recently is a result of more people being pissed about this move piling on to the DDOS attacks?
If they had decided to do this a week earlier I doubt it would be this controversial.
Why’s that?
I mentioned earlier or elsewhere on this thread that right now, the narrative that I’m aware of is as follows:
Lemmy.world users: just vibing, doing their thing
Concern troll: comes in with a freshly created account to pearl-clutch about scary illegal things
Lemmy.world users: hahaha look at this loser downvotes them to oblivion, resumes vibing
Lemmy.world Admins: Piracy?! OMG that’s ILLEGAL, thank goodness someone pointed this out to us
If they had an existing stance on piracy, they should have been already enforcing it. Then it wouldn’t look like they were successfully spurred into action by a bad-faith actor.