Removal of piracy communities
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.
!crackwatch@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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 compared to linking to 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.
!piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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 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, but we will continue to remove communities that are directly facilitating copyright infringement. @db0@lemmy.dbzer0.com, the admin of 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.
!piracy@lemmy.ml
Same as !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com.
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, 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 to better explain this.
We apologize for the delays in communication.
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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.
Well, it’s more that we believe a domain root url embedded in an image, or a link to a rentry doesn’t really have any risks. At least, nothing likely to get us sued. Note that all these domain links existed (and still exist) in the reddit /r/piracy wiki for years without problems.
The reason being that almost all of these takedowns are coming from automated crawlers, who won’t bother OCR every image they come across, or b64-decoding every string.
yeah, as long as you don’t specifically point to a copyright infringing content things will be fine. that’s why all piracy related subreddits are still not taken down.
Must be exhausting having this problem with LW twice now. Can’t make this shit up at this point. Lol
I’m unhappy with this decision and don’t support it.
same
You aren’t on the lemmy.world server so why does it matter to you?
Well you see, since Lemmy.world is a large instance, the vast majority of the Lemmy network actually. Such decisions ultimately affect everyone else because they slash your engagement severely in all affected communities.
So even on other instances the decisions of a behemoth like lemmy.world can still affect users there, in way more indirect and annoying ways.
Hopefully unhappy users will change instances and thé population will ne more spread as a result
Ok I can see that secondary impact. This is the reality is unless someone else is willing to run a big instance and accept the legal risk. To everyone complaining: first are you even donating to your instance, and second, willing to give a lot more $$$ to support them if there was a legal problem. I doubt they would.
This is where the benefit of having more than one account on different instances comes in. When admins make a move users don’t like, users can just log into a different instance to access the content they want to see.
Honestly though, not very good optics on doing this without any prior communication. You are going to do whatever you want on your instance, but as IIRC the biggest Lemmy instance, its a really bad look to be making changes without saying anything. It makes me (and likely others) wonder if you hadn’t been called out on it by some users posting about it if there would even have been an announcement like this at all. Granted, there is no legal obligation for transparency, but many users here greatly appreciate the transparency in the past that was done prior to taking action for the most part.
Side note: Going to go out on a limb here and assume the content takedown request was Nintendo related, and the takedown request was probably filed by someone who does not actually represent Nintendo. This happens so often that it is basically my default assumption. This may or may not be the case here, but its hard to imagine that there would be anyone else with their eyes on such a tiny community as Lemmy, especially in comparison to Reddit.
Again. Really? 🤦♂️
Yup, and this time it seems like they’re getting more support from the community than downvotes (or they’re upvoting their own post).
Its currently in the negative, so I don’t think the support is there. Just early upvotes.
Just early upvotes.
I was a bit worried because those early votes had a very large positive ratio and that could mean a very drastic culture shift since the last one of these posts, which obviously wouldn’t bode well, not just for Lemmy.world but for interactions from it as well on other instances.
When it comes to linking to content, it’s essential to understand that simply providing a link does not equate to sharing the actual content. Each URL on the Megathread serves the specific purpose of leading users in a particular direction.
If this practice is deemed negative, then one could argue that every search engine operates erroneously. Search engines display results and guide users to specific destinations, mirroring the functionality of our approach to linking.
I suspect lemmy.world doesn’t have the time, money, or patience to deal with the potential lawsuit or legal actions to required to defend that argument.
But the communities are hosted on .ml and dbzer0 not on World. So .ml and dbzer0 will be the ones in legal trouble.
This is an untested legal question. The way federation works is that the content is hosted on Lemmy.world servers by virtue of being federated. The only way to not have the content hosted locally is to block those communities.
Lemmy.world didn’t develop the federation standard and didn’t put the content up in the first place, but takedown requests and lawsuits traditionally targets content hosts, not necessarily the specific offending party who used the host. Sites avoid legal liability by policing their content, which Lemmy.world did in this case.
I personally still think it’s shitty because fuck the man and all, but I get it. It’s not my ass on the line, it’s theirs.
It will not hold up in court, this is like saying a search engine that has cached pages is liable for the info on those pages. The worst that happens is they get a request to pull the cached pages from their engine.
“will not hold up in court” still means you’re in court, and lawyers aint cheap.
In my country, the state provides you with legal representation if you’re unable to afford it on your own. Is that not the case in other countries (USA and Europe specifically)?
It is in the USA as well, but usually public defenders are stretched so thin they don’t really help you.
That’s a fair point, and it’s crazy that it’s allowed to happen. Can’t afford to fight it? You must be guilty…such a shit thing.
You wanna plop down the money for a team of lawyers to test that theory I’m sure a server would be happy to take you up on it.
No need to, nothing was hosted on anyones site, this is a nothing burger and a bullshit excuse to rid Lemmy of any piracy talks.
Well, that’s basically what a torrent community is, and plenty of those are targeted by takedown requests/lawsuits. They don’t host pirated content, they host access to pirated content which is hosted/seeded by others.
Correct, which just gets take down requests.
Right, but this is where the legal gray area comes in because it hasn’t been tested before. The way lemmy works is that lemmy.world is also hosting the content on their physical servers.
Nevertheless, they will need legal guidance to navigate this issue. These Lemmy instances are run by volunteers.
People are always welcome to join the ship , the seas are all open for everyone to adventure.
This shit again? Last time I jumped from world the instance I went to shut down. I guess its time to start looking at spinning up my own.
I get it. But I want to see that stuff. So I can’t stay where I can’t see it.
That’s totally understandable and we wouldn’t blame you for moving to a instance that doesn’t block piracy I’d you would like access to that. We just cannot take the risk.
Whilst I completely understand why you, as private individuals with limited income and not a huge org that has high priced legal teams on call, have made this decision (I think people forget that it costs money just to defend yourself in court, irrespective of how accurate or legal the charges might be), this is about the 3rd or 4th time that the Admin team have communicated and taken action very, very poorly.
It’s really not a difficult thing to do. A post such as this either before or immediately after taking such important actions. I realise you’re all busy people with real life stuff to do too but surely you tell new Admin’s when they’re onboarded that momentous decisions that affect a lot of people must be communicated to the members immediately?
Yeah, we’re sorry for the lag. We did post post a few hours later, as we’re all in different timezones.
I understand that, but surely the Admin who took the action isn’t in a different timezone form themselves? What was stopping them immediately posting just before or just after taking the action?
The decisions you make are one thing. The way you keep handling them so incredibly poorly is quite another.
We try to be as transparent as possible. There was a lag between action and announcement, it happens sometimes.
Might as well ban Lemmy.ml under rules 1, 2, 4, and 5.1 if you’re going to start enforcing your rules.
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.
What a pathetic response. I am interpreting this as:
We will fold whenever we get a legal request, real or not.
To users on .world, I strongly recommend scrubbing your posts, deleting your account, and then going to a different instance. These admins have proven that they WILL buckle to legal pressure no matter what - that means also giving up user data upon request. Your data is completely accessible by admins. That includes your private messages and unpublished pictures.
Off the top of my head I can think of a few scenarios:
- Being LGBTQIA+ in a country where its illegal to be
- Consuming content from websites not approved by the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
- Disparaging the Chinese government while being a Chinese citizen
- Activism discussion (eg. extinction rebellion, antifa, the auntie network)
- Right to repair in countries where its illegal to circumvent device DRM to perform repairs
I’ve deleted my account there because that TOS and so-called privacy policy are complete and utter trash.
That includes your private messages
Those messages are not private, there is a disclaimer about it every time you write one
Which is why we should refer to them as “DMs” or “direct messages”.
Lemmy.World is legally primarily bound by the countries listed here.
If we get a request, of course we will evaluate that request.
When it comes to taking down content, such as copyright infringing content, we may err on the side of caution to reduce the legal risk we’re exposing ourselves to.
When it comes to handing over data that is not already publicly accessible, such as (not-really-)private messages or IP addresses of users, we will not “err on the side of caution” and hand out data to everyone, but we must follow the laws that we’re operating under. See also https://legal.lemmy.world/privacy-policy/#4-when-and-with-whom-do-we-share-your-personal-information.
ಠ_ಠ
Behold my look of slight disapproval.
I’d much rather find out about these sorts of things from you guys than a fediverse post.
I already have an alt for nosing around on such stuff since last time around, so it’s not hugely inconvenient.
Still, thanks for keeping things running. Much appreciated!
We’re really trying our best the keep the lights on and our servers safe. ❤️
where’s the integrity? quite frankly i don’t get the “we didn’t know” rhetoric. the previous removal is literally the most controversial post of all time. understood that they can be subject to legal action. no blame for being risk adverse but this post is kind of a nothingburger.
I knew this announcement was coming and I’d figured this action would have come from an admin who wasn’t aware of the previous context.
I just love the idea that an admin would take action without communicating with literally anyone else on the team, and that be a totally normal and okay thing.
The execution should have been better, but the decision itself was a team decision, not an individual admin decision without talking to the rest of the team.
It’s actually hilarious 🍿
Running my own instance really starts to pay off
