This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
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.
Are you telling me Reddit is free to have a Piracy sub, but Lemmy isn’t?
What’s the point of Lemmy if Reddit is more free?
Reddit is an American company, subject to American laws, that has a legal department (i.e. has lawyers on retainer). Lemmy World, like most other instances, is run by volunteers and donations and is subject to the laws where it’s hosted and/or where its operators reside.
When you receive a takedown / DMCA / whatever legal mumbo-jumbo applies to your jurisdiction, you have two choices:
The first option is free. The second option costs a lot of money if you don’t already have lawyers on retainer and can cost even more money if the court rules against you.
Sucks, but that’s the way it is.
Again, I’m only speculating that was the case here. However, given Germany is one of the jurisdictions LW is accountable to, it’s not that wild of a guess.
That’s such a broad question that I’m not even going to bother. Instead, I’ll answer with the same question as when “states’ rights” are brought up:
“
States’ rightsFree to do what, exactly?”You’re also free to run your own instance and accept all the legal liabilities that come with that.
You actually have a third option: file a DMCA Counternotice. If my reading is correct, the very act of filing the counternotice allows you to keep the content up unless the original filer “insists” (it’s the mechanism against “DMCA trolling”). DMCAis not a jail-free card to erase content from the internet.
Possibly, but the DMCA is strictly a US thing. The comply or fight in court are the only two somewhat universal options.
Other countries have other similar laws, though. LW’s TOS says they’re under legal jurisdiction of Finland, The Netherlands, and Germany. Not sure what their laws are like, but Germany seems pretty strict about it.
Could be, but still it reeks of overreaction. Without the need of seeing anything else, it’s almost impossible that Germany’s law is that strict that “linking to (discussion of) pirated material” would be off, since if that was the case Google would be making Germany rich with their fines, which doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s even worse when it comes down to saying “discussing or mentioning” internet piracy would be illegal - under the way copyright holders themselves understand it, this would mean mentioning the market of secondhand sales would be illegal in such jurisdictions.
Yeah, until LW addresses it, all we can really do is guess. I’ve just jumped to the most logical conclusion, but that doesn’t mean it’s even close.
For what it’s worth, as an instance admin myself: I don’t get paid to run it, I have other things to worry about, and most definitely don’t have time or energy to deal with copyright BS. That said, I can completely understand their position and reaction.
Depending on how my day was going, I’d have also probably “shot first and asked questions later” with regard to removing the community and waiting until I had time to compose a post about it and be present to deal with the inevitable drama that would cause.
Hopefully they make an announcement soon.
You seem to be confusing Lemmy.world with Lemmy as a whole. Lemmy is free to be used for anything by anyone.
Lemmy.world is the largest and most mainstream Lemmy server, so they need to be especially careful about legal issues. If lemmy.world gets taken down due to mirroring content hosted on lemmy.dbzer0.com, the whole network would partially collapse because of how many users and communities are hosted on lemmy.world.
It’s not even close to worth the risk. This is how federation is supposed to work.
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I’m not from lemmy.world, I’m from sh.itjust.works. We have never banned you at all. And I understand your argument.
But it’s not our place to decide what the lemmy.world admins do with their server. It also doesn’t affect you personally at all. It’s not like they defederated your server, it only affects their users who were subscribed to that community, and they can always just make an account on another server.
Reddit’s piracy community doesn’t discuss the practical stuff like dbzero’s does
You know the meme where Bender goes, “I’ll do my own thing, with Blackjack and hookers!”
Lemme provides that. Servers are managed by different groups and you can absolutely make your own, with blackjacks and hookers.
Reddit has corporate lawyers. Lemmy does not.