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.
Problem is, it IS hosted here. That’s the nature of the Fediverse. It doesn’t just create links to other instances, it creates distinct copies of content on each instance. I am neither viewing this post on lemmy.world nor responding to it via lemmy.world. I am interacting with a distinct copy hosted on a completely unaffiliated instance, in a completely different country.
That is not persuasive to me really that they would have liability. But ultimately i don’t have to be convinced of anything. Its the instance owner to do as they wish. I think its the wrong call, and premature in the extreme. So do a lot of users. So if this is their decision then it will just come with disappointed posts and down votes and a little less engagement is all.
Let’s take the inflammatory subject solely to make a point.
If someone posted CP to !disney_pictures@lemmy.xyz, that content is then immediately copied to every instance that has at least one subscriber to !disney_pictures@lemmy.xyz. It now appears on NEW of the community and the front page of every single one of those instances. It’s not a link to the content, it’s the actual content, hosted on every single once of those instances.
You not convinced there’s the potential for liability for every single one of those instances and their admins?
No.
Not sure which part of that law you’re going with but I appreciate the arrogance of quoting US law as a silver bullet on a global platform in a thread started on a server in Germany.
It’s a personal decision to host in a country without similar protections, maybe they should move the server to a country with less legal exposure like the US?