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.
You’re a moron. Piracy is not stealing because nothing is ever taken from the copyright holder, unless you’re going to argue that a theoretical purchase is being stolen. By which logic, deciding not to buy something is stealing.
Insults aside, I think this is a bit of a stretch honestly. You could say the same thing about huge swathes of the information sector.
This is a pretty weak analogy, but I hope it illustrates my feelings on this. Imagine a museum that charged for entry, to help pay for its staff and for maintenance. And say you could break in at night without damaging anything, just to look at the artifacts for free. You may not be stealing, as as you say perhaps you would never pay for entry, but you are choosing to deny other human beings any kind of compensation for the work they’ve done. If everybody did this, how would the museum continue to function?