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.
Like I said, this isn't new ground being traversed. There is a pretty straightforward method for dealing with this that doesn't involve lawsuits unless the LW admins intentionally ignore the process.
People here are acting as if LW is some unique thing and that copyright law is an unknown entity. We know how this works. The person I responded to seems to think that LW is somehow unique, and I would like to understand their thought process.
I might end up leaving-- more for the ban stuff than the blocking piracy stuff-- but that's wholly beside the point when it comes to whether copyright law works like people are suggesting. It doesn't. The LW admins aren't going to be unexpectedly served papers for a lawsuit. They're going to get a boilerplate email with information on a claim of copyright infringement and they're going to remove the content without question and that will be the end of it.
Like I said, "just leave if you don't like it" has nothing to do with the point I'm making.
How does "that's not how this works" sound like whining? I can't tell if you're just not reading anything, or if you are desperately trying to have a different conversation with me than the one I'm having.