Removal of piracy communities - Lemmy.World
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
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Online_piracy] compared to linking to
https://en.wikipedia.org/ [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
[http://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 [http://lemmy.dbzer0.com],
but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating
copyright infringement. @[email protected] [https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/u/db0],
the admin of lemmy.dbzer0.com [http://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
[https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#4-illegal-content], 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
[https://legal.lemmy.world/tos/#41-piracy] to better explain this. We apologize
for the delays in communication.
