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.
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I haven’t found eatablished-Lemmy to be high-EQ.
I have found it to be very attached to free stuff, however.
Calling fellow users idiots isn’t exactly nice.
He didn’t call us idiots. He called us unempathetic. And I’d say that’s been a fair assessment of a lot of the internet. I know that when I was on Reddit, I’d read a lot of comments that were filled with entitlement, people feeling they were owed something especially if that something was free, and very little empathy. For how much Redditors (and now that many of us have fled to Lemmy to build a new social media life, Lemmings) like to criticize the, “They’re just lazy, I’m really struggling,” mindset, they sure do like to ask for free things but complain if people treat them the same way.
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It’s not just the Internet. There is an irregular declension that is used all over the place. It was immortalized by Bernard Woolley in that pair of documentary programs Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minister:
You see it everywhere. A common one goes like this: “I speak frankly, you’re being harsh, he’s an aggressive asshole”.
Once you see that pattern of irregular verb conjugation in one place, you see it everywhere.
But he didn’t call his fellow users idiots. IQ and EQ are different things entirely.
First sensible response I’ve seen on this thread. Why would Lemmy.world want to incur legal costs that they probably could not recoup? Which angry users on this post will donate $500/hr that the top law firms charge?
None. Precisely none. This is a huge case of “let’s you and him fight!”
Look at what happened to Gary Bowser. Dude basically ran PR on a website, but because he was the guy who they were actually able to find and get a hold of easily, he’s now on the hook for millions of dollars of damages that he didn’t cause to Nintendo.
I am disappointed in this because I think that there is such a thing as ethical piracy and protest piracy and that they’re important. But I also know that those things aren’t going to be stopped or even significantly hindered by one instance deciding not to host their content. And I understand the fear that comes with stories about how rights holders have gone after whoever the fuck they can when they’ve got a burr up their ass about something.
Should the admins of Lemmy.World be held liable for a community simply discussing piracy and not actively practicing it on the site? No. Would they be? We don’t know. It’s possible. And that’s what makes it scary. People who commit digital crimes often get hit with disproportionately harsh punishments. They’re sometimes treated like terrorists. It’s insane. And yes, it’s frightening.
Ethical piracy lmao
The internet never ceases to amaze
Abandonware is ethical piracy since there’s no feasible way to purchase it from the rights holders directly.
You know what I hadn’t considered abandonware, and I will def gladly concede both that point and supplying to “blacklist” countries that ban media.
I pirate like a son-of-a-bitch.1 The stuff I pirate is not available where I live. There is literally zero avenues for me to purchase it.
In what meaningful (←this word is important and doing a lot of heavy lifting, so pay close attention to it!) way are the people I’m pirating from getting harmed? As such, in what meaningful (←c.f. above for the importance of this word) way, then, is it unethical?
And if it isn’t unethical it is … ?
The Internet truly does never cease to amaze. Just not in the way that some of its louder, brasher, more uninformed, thoughtless portions think it does.
1 I still support lemmy.world’s decision to block those communities. Yes, you can be pro-piracy, an active pirate, and still support an action that is contrary to piracy. Welcome to “nuance”. It’s not a native of the Internet so you don’t see it very often.
Piracy bad! Won’t somebody think of the multibillion dollar corporations?? T_T
I’m pirate shit too, and support this decision. One can pirate shit and still realize most people pirating shit are just people stealing.
Piracy creates a copy, it does not remove the original like theft does. Also, people have a variety of reasons to pirate. Content not available in their country, wanting to test something before buying it, already having the thing in some form,but piracy being easier…
One can steal Intellectual Property, so physicality of something isn’t exactly a real argument.
No, they’re violating copyright law.
I mean, it is a thing. I’m not saying that you’ll agree that it’s a right thing or that it’s justifiable. I understand arguments against it. But it’s more along the lines of Peter Sunde’s stuff. Piracy which fights for freedom of information, against things like corporate secrets and abuses, things like that. One of the examples of ethical piracy has been using piracy to share news and media with blackout countries, nations that are banned from getting any media that isn’t state approved. I would call that kind of piracy ethical piracy.
Protest piracy is where you pirate something in protest of the people who would otherwise be making a profit off of it. There’s a reason why that’s not under the same umbrella. People can call pirating Adobe products what they want, but it’s not at the same level of trying to effect social change as ethical piracy reaches for.
Apparently, none of this was even hosted on lemmy.world. And didn’t have anything to do with it. The decision is a pretty knee jerk.
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If you think Lemmy is even on their radar when reddit still hosts much bigger communities having all the same conversations, you’re crazy. I would bet they don’t even know we exist yet.
An ancient legal strategy in systems with Common Law is to build up precedence. The way this works is thus:
Small fry like Lemmy instance owners are perfect fodder for this strategy.
Except they’ve already attempted this against much bigger fries, and lost. The precedence goes the other way.
Well, the whole point of a DMCA notice is to let you remove content BEFORE the legal action. And I don’t know if you looked at it, but the Piracy sub is only discussion, with a rule that disallows any links. If anything, they’d go for the actual instance that hosts it, not this totally unrelated one. I don’t think they even know Lemmy exists. And yet, the Piracy Reddit is completely fine.
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This is the Way.