lemmy.world blocked it. I guess it is their right to do so, if you want to keep access to it move to another instance (it is not healthy that so many people are on LW).
Not sure why nobody in the comments is distinguishing between blocking a community on an instance (removing /c/piracy) and defederating instances (saying your users can’t subscribe to otherinstance.com/c/piracy). They are very different things. We should be very skeptical of defederation.
Removing a community because it violates the rules of your instance is A-OK and every instance should do this. Anybody can run an instance, and anybody can set their own rules, that’s the whole idea of federation.
De-federating other instances because you find their content objectionable is less ok. Lemmy is like e-mail. Everybody registers at gmail or office365 or myfavoriteemail.com. Every email host runs their own servers, but they all talk to each other through an open protocol. You would be pissed to find out that gmail just suddenly decided to stop accepting mail from someothermailprovider.com because a bunch of their users are pirates or tankies. Or blocked your favourite email newsletter from reaching your inbox because it had inflammatory political content.
Allowing your users to receive e-mail, or content from subcommunities on other lemmy instances is not a legal risk like hosting the content yourself is (IANAL etc). Same way Gmail is not liable if somebody on some other e-mail server does something illegal by emailing a gmail user. That’s why you can register at torrentwebsite.com and get a user confirmation email successfully delivered to your inbox. Gmail is federated with all other e-mail services without needing to endorse them or accept legal liability for them.
Lemmy’s strength, value, and future comes from being the largest federated space for link-sharing and other forms of communication.
It’s not really apt to compare email to Lemmy. Email is a one-to-one communication method, it’s like sending a letter in the mail. In the same way a mail carrier isn’t culpable if they deliver a package of drugs, Google isn’t responsible for delivering illegal emails. On Lemmy though, you’re hosting a copy of the post locally on your instance. It’s accessible to users as well as people who aren’t signed in.
Good, I hope lemmy.world defederates their ass, dbzer0 is an evil instance who’s goal is to promote illegal activity, they home most of all the piracy communities out there, they should be censored and defederated for being the evil pieces of shit they are.
hey snowflake. maybe you should go back to your little safe space at exploding heads where you can hate on trans people without seeing such scary, abhorrent things as digital piracy. instead of hiding behind your 4th alt of the day.
You’re absolutely right, they don’t they have politicians, lawyers, and police on their side.
But it is important that people know that what they’re doing is illegal that way they’re not surprised when they’re sitting in a jail cell after downloading a full collection of hollywood movies, or needing to sell their home to pay the fines.
Also No, I’ll stop once the pirates leave lemmy.world, then I’ll join back under a new account probably a new name and moderate some nice homebrew communites (no Piracy allowed).
So, you support the corporations charging abusive prices and fees to post record profits every quarter?.. I’m not going to say piracy is right, ethical or should be legal, but I get it.
When we talk about abusive corporation being unethical, maybe a part of us should see the opposite as ethical too?
And piracy is not even a opposite backlash, it’s a way around that helps out a lot of people in different scenarios. I used to pirate games as a kid because I didn’t have any money and now I’m one of those who has youtube premium for convinience.
And there are hell of a lot more positive use cases like sharing censored data and general p2p file sharing
I love IP, they can protect my business identity and other valuable things in the world. Please don’t blame IP, they don’t need our oxygen. Blame the whiny toolbag.
Exactly. I don’t get why people are freaking out so much when it’s easy to create a new account and clients support multiple accounts anyways. Big instances are a big target so they need to protect themselves. On Reddit the piracy subs are neutered because they can’t link to anything. What’s good about the fediverse is you can have sub verses within it. It’s dumb to have your piracy account linked to your main account anyways.
They’re trying to avoid law enforcement and lawyers at their doors.
Even if you prevail, either can be a very expensive and/or destructive process.
Make no mistake, Reddit’s recent refusal to provide details surrounding users that were discussing piracy is highly unlikely to happen in the fediverse. Admins are going to get hit with a subpoena and comply because they can’t afford not to.
They don’t want to be arrested lmao. I am pro-piracy, but I would never want to host pirated content from my own servers. You can absolutely be jailed for that.
Not sure that their monthly running budget would even cover a consultation with a lawyer. There’s no reason that they should accept this risk. Just move to a different instance or host your own instead of causing drama.
It one guy financing it with donations and some volunteer admins. Seems very unlikely that federating with a piracy community could cause any legal problems, but if I personally owned the servers running Lemmy.world like ruud does I might be a little careful. My wife would kill me if I got arrested for hosting a Lemmy instance, man. Is it worth the risk?
I don’t think they are idiots more centralization means more regulation weather one likes it or not, regulators somewhere will notice you more popular you become. Piracy is illegal and media publishers will use law whenever they can to target whatever they notice. It’s now LW’s fault. Problem is it grew too big too fast. All these FOSS apps they were showing LW as default option to sign up instead of randomised one. So a big mass gathered at LW and bada-boom-bada-bam piracy banned. Register on smaller instances or run your own.
That would be true if piracy was hosted on their instance, which isn’t the case. They just defederated the main hub because they’re a bunch of white knight cry babies. Also piracy isn’t illegal in the majority of the world. I don’t live in the US and don’t give a shit about the bottom line of some giant media corporation that would destroy literal lives in the pursuit of greed. Just the fact that so many people jump to the defense of these corporations is very telling about the current state of the fediverse.
LW blocked three communities on db0, but they didn’t defederate with db0. This means LW users can still talk to db0 users, and db0 users can still access LW. At the same time, content from db0 will not be mirrored on LW servers. Basically, they’ve covered their arses from legal issues, while not cutting ties entirely.
As I understand, LW servers are hosted by a German company, and Germany is rather strict on piracy. So I understand why they had to do this.
Yeah there is nuance to everything. I totally understand LW’s decision and I don’t blame them, main reason I don’t have an account in LW becauze I saw this day coming long ago. And if lemmy keeps getting popular even lemmus.org might do the same and I would understand that too
LMAO you think an Instance enfocing their rules is a power trip? You sound like the dumbasses I banned from r/PS2 and r/3dshacks who would ask how to pirate games against our rules and then whine and complain that we were power tripping because we banned them using our own authority as mods in our own subreddit.
Not anymore. Right from the first post the admins made about it, they tried to make it clear that they had come up with a plan to lower costs and should have realised before it was too late that AWS was gonna charge them through the nose once traffic increased. The migration’s complete now from what I understand, and it would take a huge influx of users to even come close to those figures now.
Federation does not by definition require giving admins the ability to censor content. The Fediverse implementation unfortunately does, but it sure didn’t need to.
That has nothing to do with the point. The admins are entitled to block whatever they like. If you dislike it, federation lets you chance instances so you can follow different rules you agree with. There’s a ton of instances that are just as good and allow this stuff, so stop being centralized!
Let’s see what happens when we get everyone to defederate your ass for supporting illegal content, or are you going to evade their defederation attempts with a new domain? Are you going to violate their right to censor and ban you on their server with their own rules.
Instances aren’t banning other instances for federation with communities they dislike. Instances ban other instances for hosting content they dislike. The benefit of starting an instance is you choose who to federate with.
The first time I pirated a game was when I was unable to play Mass Effect 2 due to DRM blocking my ability to play at all (highlighting the irony of DRM, the fact that the pirated version was free of this issue).
When I had a potato PC, I would often pirate games before I bought them, to see if they would be able to run. If I hadn’t done that, I would have erred on the side of caution and not bought any games I was unsure of.
There are also a few pieces of media I’ve enjoyed that would have been literally impossible to access if I hadn’t pirated them, and were impossible to pay for.
Piracy can also allow people to access games and/or software that would otherwise be lost to time (abandonware).
Not all piracy is stealing and also some stealing is based.
How does it make sense? Did Comcast have to/did they block my access to RARBG while it still existed? No. I get removing piracy content on their own instance, but blocking other instances is not necessary.
The problem is that the admins are all just volunteers and the instance doesn’t exist to make money. If a big company decides to sue them, even if they are in the right, they will be drowned in legal fees.
Not to mention, legality doesn’t need to be a question if the admins of Lemmy.world get drowned in legal fees before even having to appear in a court. The rich don’t exist by our laws and idk why anybody expects differently at this point.
Is allowing access to piracy resources the same as hosting piracy resources? Is Comcast at risk of being shut down because they didn’t block everyone’s access to RARBG? This is largely rhetorical; the answer is “no”. lemmy.world’s admins are not being honest.
Lemmy.world’s admins are well within their rights to exclude evil people who take what doesn’t belong to them from being a part of the lemmy.world instance.
Facilitating Piracy no matter how you put it is wrong and illegal, it is wrong and illegal to support people who do it.
Are you sure that’s true? All content from all other federated servers are hosted on all other servers? That certainly doesn’t sound right; I thought that the fediverse protocol just allowed us access to other servers running the protocol, not that our instance actually runs content from their instance.
Yes, this is how federation works and it’s the main point all those users that are bitching about the move do not understand. LW does not care about piracy, they are afraid of legal consequences, because with the federation protocol you are hosting all content of other instances. It’s not embedded, it’s mirrored, so there is no legal difference between the origin instance and the federated instance.
Can someone transcribe this for those of us using screen readers? As a server in Canada, We’re also worried about the hosting risk of the piracy community and considering blocking it. I’d love to read the LW statement.
Thanks! I didn’t realize there was an announcement on Lemmy, or I would have searched. Unfortunately screenshots are kind of the only way to share posts on Discord, because you can’t link someone to a Discord message on a server they’re not a member of, so I can’t blame you for a screenshot there. However, it is possible to add alt-text on images you post to Lemmy. :-)
Earlier today, 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.
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 assitance in obtaining it.
Add comment