cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/2881638
The largest piracy community is hosted over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
lemmy.world has blocked it. It appears to have also blocked !piracy@lemmy.ml.
If this is a problem for you, I’d suggest migrating accounts using LASIM to an instance that doesn’t block it (such as lemm.ee).
edit:
An official announcement has been made:
Might be worth remembering here that Lemmy instances, including .world are hosted by regular people. Not massive multinational companies worth billions who can engage the best legal talent around.
If Hollywood comes after a Lemmy instance, Holywood have a huge legal team and endless money. The Lemmy instance has some guy. They could quite literally destroy a persons life. With that in mind, I don’t blame any instance owners for erring on the side of taking a stance that won’t put them in the legal firing line.
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It’s be nice if there’d been some discussion first, and perhaps a solution other than an admin vanishing a community without notice. Even just some text informing the user “You can’t see this content on lemmy.world. Please go to the instance directly”.
Regardless if the decision is understandable, the method used here is not going to sit well with people. After how many years of spez, these kinds of behind the scenes snap decisions that change the site overnight with no apparent regard for the community is going to leave a bad taste in people’s mouths. It wouldn’t have hurt to bring it to the community rather than just shadow banning without a word.
Not even because there needed to be a discussion, but just as a basic courtesy.
It doesn’t inspire confidence or endear the instance to its users.
Even just some text informing the user “You can’t see this content on lemmy.world. Please go to the instance directly"
That would have to be supported by Lemmy, which I believe is currently not the case.
You’re welcome to go to a different instance. That’s the entire point of lemmy. If you don’t like how an instance is ran you can go somewhere else.
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Protecting himself from what? The community hosts literally zero pirated content.
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Pirate Bay shouldn’t, but linking to torrents can at least give megacorps some kind of backwards excuse to come after them.
The pirating communities here don’t link to anything. It’s literally against their rules to do so. It’s solely for discussion.
I’m confused, Are they actually hosting anything illegal?
No. .world is just afraid of everything. Better they shut down their instance.
Not sa far as I know.
No, but that hasn’t stopped IP holders from bad faith litigations in the past.
Why would Hollywood come after them? It is not like people are sharing movies there. Posts there are etremely mild.
I’m not saying they are or aren’t. I’m simply saying that we all know the big media companies go after people at the drop of a hat. They recently tried to get reddit to expose the identities of people discussing piracy over there. To their credit reddit told them no and defended themselves legally. And that’s the issue. The media companies can accuse anyone of anything if it even slightly smells like piracy and the target has to legally defend themselves. This is fine if you’re a multibillion valued company. Not so fine if you’re just some guy who just wanted to run a Lemmy instance out of his own pocket.
This is a well reasoned answer. If this were my instance I would also ban communities linking to pirated software. A single lawsuit and lawyer bill for a regular guy, and that can fuck your life up all because you tried to run a decent community. I have a username I use for browsing lemmynsfw, I’ll make one for browsing piracy related things too.
Best bet I think is to set up a non-profit limited liability type of company. Then at least there is a good chance the individual doesn’t get fucked. (Ymmv depending on legal jurisdiction of course)
You still need expensive lawyers to defend yourself. Registering a LLC isn’t a get out of jail free card and corporations don’t shield you from personal criminal liability (unless you’re rich, see comment about expensive lawyers).
Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.
I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!
It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.
Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?
It’s unfortunate, but it’s kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I’ll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.
Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?
Recently Nintendo closed a lawsuit where the person in question is basically doomed to a lifetime of financial ruin. He was to spend 3 years in prison but was released and owes Nintendo $10 million. Nintendo, the poor indie company, is now entitled to 25% up to 30% of his income for the rest of his life. Gary Bowser Vs. Nintendo.
His name is fucking Bowser!? He needs to sue Nintendo for infringing on his trademark
Hmm, an amount of $10 million to sue Nintendo for trademark infringement sounds fair.
Fuck Nintendo, jesus
Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?
Sued him (so far nothing irregular) and he has to pay 10 million dollars or something along this magnitude. Bottom line is, he will have to give a good portion of his income for the rest of his life to Nintendo. OK, that guy was kinda stupid and monetized the website through ads but the punishment is still super excessive for something that resulted in no bodily harm for anyone. Meanwhile, the ROM site could be googled and yet Google is still free to allow users to find pirated media. YouTube started as a video piracy platform (not officially, of course, but unlicensed uploads of popular videos were the reason YouTube grew so much). LW admins will not be granted the same luxury.
Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?
Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?
Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t look up the exact details before writing because the overall point remains that courts punish individuals exceptionally hard for copyright offenses.
In 2018, someone maintaining a ROM site was ordered to pay Nintendo $12 million.
In late 2021, someone was sentenced to 10 years of prison and to pay Nintendo $14.5 million. That person got out on good behavior last April, but 25-30% of their wages are going to be garnished until their debt to Nintendo is paid off - which will likely take the rest of their life.
Great summary on this Episode of Darker Diaries from last week
Here’s an article that has more details on what happened.
What Sega doesn’t
No, wait
Spoken like a true Darknet Diaries listener :)
I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you’re going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it’s an unfair battle from the start.
I can’t blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There’s a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it’s protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.
I think people forget that decentralized doesn’t mean anonymous, and it also doesn’t mean that server admins and servers aren’t beholden to local laws
They never even got a DMCA takedown notice or any sort of copyright claims. Just because one user asked. Wtf
Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.
Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.
EDIT: The post in question in case others haven’t seen it https://lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.
Not even reddit admins were this stupid
Reddit has lawyers they can call on to mount a defense. Im willing to bet this is entirely about liability
Understandable reason but there is not one illegally shared file in these communities. What’s next, watching a John Wick movie makes me a murderer now?
Lmao. What a shitshow
And now the account that redirected all of lemmy.world has been banned from lemmy.world for ban evasion.
This whole thing is weird
https://lemm.ee/post/4235833 yours got a bad gateway
yours got a bad gateway
That’s just lemmy.world servers having their usual issues loading. Though it is kind of amusing, a lemmy.world user going to lemm.ee to view a lemmy.world post, federation is funny that way :P
True but it hosted in Germany. That country does not take it easy on piracy…
Even the German specific Lemmy instances like https://feddit.de do not block the piracy discussion communities.
The piracy blocking stuff seems like something lemmy.world admins decided to do based on a troll from another instance demanding it.
That user can sue if they don’t obey, in most jurisdictions. If it comes that far, it’s too late.
Why would the user be able to sue? Unless they thought their work was being infringed (in which case why they wouldn’t send a dmca?) I don’t see what possible standing they’d have.
Wtf dbzero was a huge proponent of the fediverse and has been a part of the recent swell in users. I don’t agree with this decision at all
Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.
At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating
Would you mind explaining the difference?
Blocking the community just blocks those specific communities. Defederating would be blocking everything on lemmy.dbzer0.com.
Basically they blocked the communities but not the instances they were hosted on, so people on lemmy.world can still interact with posts and comments made by people like me
Defederating cuts off the whole instance. They just blocked those three piracy communities as far as I understand.
I mean if you support illegally hosted material you can be forced to take down your website. As much as it sucks, piracy is illegal. Anyways, they haven’t defederated, just blocked that community.
In many jurisdictions what they’re doing there isn’t illegal at all. It is well understood that you do not post links out in the open.
Downloading isn’t illegal, sharing is. At least outside of the US (and a few others)
Only here because of my instance.
I’m late to comment, so I may be typing into the void.
I understand the admin’s decision to limit their exposure to legal risk. I had similar experiences as a small business owner and you would be surprised how quickly most people’s idealism is tempered by the risk of potential legal action. It’s totally possible to believe strongly in the legality of something and its benefit to society (in this case piracy) and still choose to limit your own legal exposure. As far as I know, none of us paid to be here, so the polite thing to do is say “thank you for hosting us” and move on if it’s not your thing (or just make a second account).
I believe our current copyright/intellectual property scheme is broken at best, and designed to fuck us out of every bit of culture that has ever existed, at worst. Piracy exists because the system is broken and the industry is entrenched and refuses to adapt to customer demands. It screws music fans, artists, and probably the individual low-level employees of many music industry companies and organizations.
This is not difficult to deal with, setup an account on another server and stop using lemmy.world
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Huh, isn’t this Spez strategy?
5D chess in all its glory!
No need to stop using LW. I’ve got three accounts on different instances plus kbin. Oh, and I fifth on if you count my nsfw login. Partitioning your online life is nbd, really. And the fediverse makes it easy.
Why bother to have 5, an account on a single decent instance should be sufficient.
Sopuli was my original instance from before I knew what the Fediverse was but however they have their server set federated community discovery has been broken from the beginning. World is my reddit migration account and I moderate a couple of communities there. I really like some of the communities on Beehaw, and they defederated pretty quickly from just about anyone with more than a few users, so I got an account there. Kbin didn’t seem to work as well cross-federation so…number 4. And I use a different handle for NSFW. It would be nice to have an app for aggregating usernames across instances, but I much of my browsing from desktop so it’s really nbd.
I love these comments. It shows the federation is working. If reddit did this it was “oh no what now” but with lemmy it’s just “time to move to another instance”
I just don’t like the idea of having 500 accounts after it’s all said and done, especially if most of them wind up being unused… unless I’m fundamentally doing something wrong by creating a new account on every instance I want to use?
I mean you won’t, they way it’s going to shake out is instances with similar values form nation-states and cut ties with other nation-states they dont agree with
well probably see the emergence of meta-alliances soon that dictate the degree of separation of a blacklisted instance.
You don’t need an account for every instance.
How it will mostly evolve in the future is that people will have one vanilla account, and if they want, one account for piracy and another for porn
you need an account to go to an instance that isn’t federated. this is the core flaw that makes this entire system unusable for normal people. you don’t want to have multiple accounts just so you can post the same memes in 12 different servers to get 1/40th the interaction you would get if everyone was centralized. this isn’t a discord server, its a link aggregator and decentralizing the aggregator is antithetical to making this service work.
Idk, I like it
it doesn’t mater what you like, if the platform can not grow from here, witch it can not in its current state, it will simply bleed users and die like voat.
Or just find an instance that has federation policies you agree with, you don’t need to post in every single instance - maybe some defederated because there were too many people posting the same shitty memes. And who needs 40x interaction? Reddit was too big, too many people competing for attention.
I mean saying 500 is a little hyperbolic but this is exactly why federation exists and isn’t just another Reddit.
You find what you like and go there. It’s really no different than the old forums. Reddit centralized everything, lemmy is that but also the old way.
I feel a little better about it if lemmy provided migration tools.
It certainly not the end of the world but it is kind of a pain in the ass.
Reddit has plenty of piracy communities, being more strict than reddit is is just unnecessary
They also had quite a few subs that got shut down due to copyright threats. Reddit can afford to fight multimillion dollar suits.
We should just move posting to reddit and have the lemmy instance in question only be links to reddit posts.
I love it. We will win in the end, against the corpos, they shall rule in Hell whilst we serve in Heaven
Normal people not wanted to put themselves in legal jeopardy doesn’t make them a “corpo”.
Uhhh I think you misunderstand the original quote
Not really, in seeking to gain power, they create something worthless by destroying what is valuable, but by working together, we create something glorious that none of us are really in charge of.
usually god, the ultimate authoritarian, is in charge of heaven. i’ll pass
Thank you for taking my metaphor too literally just for the edge
Given lemmy.world’s uptime vs how well pirates keep torrent seeds up, I’d be surprised if anyone in that community actually uses lemmy.world as a primary instance lmao
And here I thought that Fediverse was serious about being an alternative to heavily censored platforms. Now I see it’s just a joke.
What’s the fucking point. The community isn’t even hosted on lemmy.world. I don’t want to have to create a new a account on a new instance every time a dumbass admin decices to block a community I follow. Lemmy is doomed to fail.
Despite reports I have decided to keep the comments open and the post up. I think removing this will only add fuel to the fire.
It’s all about the liability of it, right?
I can’t really comment atm. It’s not my job to do pr for the admins but I am just a mod and I am not on the admin team. I wasn’t involved in the decision. I am trying my best to be transparent though because I don’t want this to evolve in a bigger issue.
Thanks for all you do!
Thank you for your work!
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People are missing the fundamental point of defederation. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
You can have an absolutely squeaky clean instance for memes, news and generally huge sharing communities. Instances that dont have to worry about DCMA notices or having their servers seized and you can have instances that are willing to run those risks for niche content. If legal threats start being thrown around, the meme and hobby communities dont suffer. The piracy instances can shut down, migrate and start again, making the lawyers play whackamole.
ikr…feels like I’m taking crazy pills here. this is federation at work.
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