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.
Is it a liability when the discussion happened outside of lemmy.world?
The way federation works, discussions on other instances are cached locally.
Yes, that’s what it is: cache
Caching is creating a local copy which they host. It might be legal grey area, but IMO it’s a real threat.
Not only is it cached, it is redistributed to all lemmy.world users when they visit that community. It’s equivalent to hosting something you can’t moderate.
It’s not worth the risk. Even if they would potentially be able to win a lawsuit, they still would have to pay the legal fees.
Impossible to answer as laws vary by country so what may be legal in the US may be illegal in Finland where LW is. Aside from the multi-national difficulties involved there’s also the fact that there’s been near zero court cases on it anywhere in the world (that I know of). Legal Lightening is going to strike some instance somewhere in the world eventually but no instance owner wants it to be them.