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.
Doesn’t matter if they are hosted here or not. The way federation works is that threads on different instances are cached locally.
We have NO issues with the people at db0 - we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more. As mentioned in the OP we would like to unblock as soon as we know we can not get in any legal trouble.
“we are just looking out for ourselves in a ‘better safe than sorry’ fashion while we find out more.”
This is an unfortunate aspect of individuals/small groups housing the fediverse vs big companies. Big companies have lawyers and the capital to back them, individuals do not.
If I was in your shoes, I’d do the same thing. I appreciate your wish for thus to be temporary. I hope you will share your findings once you come to a final decision; information like this is relevant to all those managing servers.
What needs to happen for you to be confident you won’t get in legal trouble, and thus unblock them? Change on the db0 side? Lemmy.world admins getting legal representation/advice? Something else? I’m curious how you all see this playing it out in the future.
Highly doubt there’s anything db0 can do. lemmy.world is in Europe, piracy has hefty legal ramifications.
Like you could argue that it isn’t piracy all you want, but if faced with the possibility of your hobby landing you decades in prison and millions in debt, would you do it?
Just create an account at db0, this really isn’t the big deal people make it out to be.
Not all of Europe. In most parts (especially Eastern Europe) the most you will get is a slap on the wrist if you are really really unlucky. And decades in prison aren’t a thing anywhere for simply sharing links to pirated content.
No one thinks of Eastern Europe as European beyond geography, excepting perhaps Eastern Europeans themselves.
Prison notwithstanding, financial ruin is a definite possibility.
People are making a mountain out of a molehill over this. The instance owner doesn’t want to risk any legal issues over hosting this instance, and I get that. Just create an account on db0 and use that. It’s not a big deal.
Instance admin isn’t some big corporation trying to silence your free speech. He’s just a dude that doesn’t want his hobby to bite him in the arse.
I don’t think I ever heard of a case where somebody has been condemned for piracy in Italy; I also know plenty of people who torrents/stream, yet none who uses a VPN to do so.
In Germany though, afaik, they are quite insane with their anti-piracy laws.
It would be preferable if you would lie less. Evil pirate uploads potentially_infringing.mp3 to to filehost. Filehost actually serves potentially_infringing.mp3, a community on db0 hosts a link to potentially_infringing.mp3, lemmy.world caches locally a copy of data from db0. Of those the one guy directly uploading the information is at risk of an extremely unlikely single digit thousands of dollars.
Nobody not even evil pirate himself is at risk of decades in prison or millions in debt. Companies responsibility basically ends at taking stuff down when specifically notified of infringing content.
Discussing piracy isn’t illegal. It would be one thing if they were hosting pirated content, but they don’t even link to anything.
If that were to change I’d understand the decision, but this just seems silly to me.
as far as i have seen (as a subscriber to c/piracy) there is no links to pirated content and they are very clear that that is not allowed
the vast majority of the discussion is on morals of piracy, anti piracy measures, etc etc
I feel like there should be a major distinction between caching remote content and hosting that content yourself. Does Cloudflare get in trouble every time the FBI seizes a site that used Cloudflare routing, CDN, or caching? Not as far as I’m aware.
Your argument is that user hosts infringing_song.mp3 on file_host, a community on lemmy.ml has a link to filehost and lemmy.world has a cached copy of the text containing the link to lemmy.ml which has a link to filehost and you think lemmy.world has legal exposure?
Words are empty, offers are void in Nebraska. You already took steps against people who simply mostly discuss piracy. What concrete steps can you take now to show that you’d actually unblock “as soon as we know”?
Soo ultimately you personally will be the only person determining what people can and can’t see, based on your perception alone. You don’t like something, you’ll ban it. You worry about something, you’ll ban it. And there won’t be a trace without you saying “we banned something”. Which means there are no checks at all to you powertripping in the future. How is this supposed to be free, open and general then? This is even worse than reddit was.
Feel free to contractually agree to pay all their legal fees, in that case.
There won’t be any legal fees since the communities being talked about are allowed in the EU. Other people have made the same point already, but if you are scared of litigation, then you can’t host a forum at all. There is always a place where your forum breaks rules. I.e. no disparaging Putin in Russia. Making fun of the twitter CEO is more likely to get you a lawsuit than any of the communities mentioned, yet it is allowed. Also, it never is a straight up instantenous lawsuit. It always starts with communication saying “don’t do that anymore please”. Once you reject, then a lawsuit is viable and not frivolous. So you can wait till that happens and then block those communities, once a company actually complains. Not when you think that maybe somewhere in the future something might happen or maybe not.
Truth is, lemmy is small fries. It will be that for a long time with the issues it has. Nobody cares about a tiny community hidden way deep inside.
It’s so nice to see so many lawyers in this thread offering their legal counsel…it makes me feel very safe when I start hosting piracychat.doodad next week. I’m assuming they will all be willing to defend me if I do get sued since they are so sure I won’t. 😃
It’s their house, you’re just visiting. If they are concerned, there’s no one else to help. If they get in trouble, will you be stepping in to help them? No.
Once you start hosting an instance that has open registration, it’s not just “their house” anymore. They are providing a service to people. They do so willingly. Arbitrairly blocking instances because you don’t know how something works and don’t bother to check it isn’t the way to host a free and open instance.
Nah, their box, their responsibility, their rules. They could shut it off tomorrow, ban people randomly, change what posts are allowed, federate as they choose. We can’t do shit, and that’s fine cause we can each make our own instance or join another
Edit Any assumption you have durable rights or privileges is just untrue.
Yes, they offer access willingly, as in “at their will”
Edit would a downvoter be able to refute me? Are we in some sort of contracted relationship with instance admins?
They CAN do all of those things but people would be right to critique them for it. Freedom isn’t freedom from criticism or complaint. Furthermore they want this to be a functional community as much as their users do which is why this discussion even exists.
That doesn’t refute anything I said. Their house, their rules.
You can criticize mom for setting a bedtime, but you must go to bed.
The discussion is not whether they can set those rules its should they and should we keep participating
Regarding your first point, there is no discussion, they can do whatever they want, they are omnipotent on that.
Regarding your second, that’s absolutely fair game.
You fucking donkey, did you read their comment before you replied to it? They aren’t doing it just because they want to; there are legal implications.
There really aren’t. Talking about piracy is allowed in Europe. Sharing stuff isn’t. This is a kneejerk reaction. Also, please don’t talk to people that way.
I will talk to rude people that harass the admins of a free service that way.
Well by your logic maybe you should go kiss Reddit’s ass then if you feel that way, they’re hosting a free service and people criticize their decisions and reactivity.
The fact that we fund this place with donations gives us all the more right to criticize them for it. Are you also going to attack people for ceasing their donations because after this I’ll never donate another cent to them ever again, and I encourage anyone else reading this to do the same.
I see the point, but still no need to be agressive
Rude
Feel free to leave if this is how you talk to people
Beehaw doesn’t have downvotes. DOESNT. HAVE. DOWNVOTES!!! HOW CAN THEY GET AWAY WITH TAKING AWAY DOWNVOTES FROM ME… WHAT RIGHT DO THEY HAVE???
It doesn’t affect me at all because I don’t have an account there. But I’m real mad, see…
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Well, caching content is not the same as copying it. The major difference in the court would be that caching is automatic - and as such you are not in complete responsibility of what it is you copied. If you do everything in your power to comply with any DMCA notices, then I couldn’t realistically see lemmy.world being targeted. This is an analogous situation to eg. accidentally opening a website containing illegal content. Sure, your computer did download the contents to the RAM, but what matters is that you acted in good faith and did not attempt to get the contents, it just happened in the process of browsing the web and as such you could not reasonably expect to receive such content.
A cache is literally a local copy.
Fighting legal challenges requires lawyers, even if you are in the right. Lawyers are crazy expensive.
Unless I’m missing something, you don’t need a lawyer to take down a post that you’ve received a DMCA removal request on.
You do if you get sued because you missed something. It’s not like lemmy world can moderate every post from every server. Any single user can get any federated community’s content pulled locally just by subscribing.
So by that logic, .world should defederate from all other instances, just to be safe?
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The dumb “well, if that’s your logic, then why don’t you just shut down your instance?” frothing in this thread is good entertainment.
It’s up to the owner of the instance to determine their own personal level of acceptable risk. It seems fairly rational to me that someone might consider a server that is dedicated to discussing illegal activities as a higher risk than one dedicated to say, discussing puppies.
The law in the US is that you aren’t responsible for what your users post unless you are specifically legally notified and furthermore the communities at issue don’t host links to infringing content they host discussions on the topic
In a world where Quad9 is in the middle of a giant lawsuit over simply serving DNS records, I can’t blame anybody for being extra cautious.
Cache being automatic doesn’t help prevent threats of being sued. They’d still have to monitor and takedown posts from those communities. Otherwise every pirate website could just get away with “oh I’m only caching this data”.
Complacency isn’t a legitimate defense against criminal activity and corporations are extremely litigious over piracy. Would you rather lemmy.world spend all their money on fighting lawsuits, or building a better instance?
Any community that is creating questionable content should create their own instance and not seek open federation with the entire fediverse. That kind of behavior is reckless and counterproductive to what we’re trying to do here.
I am not suggesting lemmy.world should be “complacent” in this activity and keep the content after receiving any type of notice. If you host any website with content coming from users, you are not responsible for what they post, as long as you try to comply with the law and remove any offending content. In this case, complacency would be specifically allowing such content, and not merely not moderating harshly everything in they grey area.
Something that’s getting lost in this conversation is the nature of the infringement and what that means to the copyright holder. Memes could be considered a form of infringement, however in practice they often serve as free publicity. The intent is not to deprive the copyright holder of revenue, but use the medium to express themselves. Exposure increases, and so does the likelihood of revenue from the conversion of new fans.
This changes with public conversations of piracy, because the nature of those conversations drift into how to deprive and evade the copyright holder by providing users just enough information to find pirated content. From a legal standpoint this can be used to prove aiding and abetting, a crime that be considered equal or an accessory to depending on the jurisdiction.
The admins are aware of how Lemmy’s content caching works, and now publicly acknowledge the existence of their federation with dbzer0; whose piracy communities are its strongest asset. Any defense of ignorance is out the door. Without banning the communities LW becomes an accessory if dbzer0 becomes liable, as would any other instance who caches dbzer0’s c/piracy.
To those who still disagree, that’s fine. Open your password manager, make some new accounts on other instances, enjoy the lemmyverse. But you have to agree that it is unreasonable to demand you hold the evidence of my crimes because it would inconvenience me otherwise.
Memes are protected under fair use doctrine as satire. Most places, IANAL.
So is discussion on the topic of piracy that doesn’t include actual links to content.
I am aware. My point is more to do with how the copyright holder perceives the actions of the individual(s). If the copyright holder feels the work brings more attention to their IP in a way can be converted into sales then they are less inclined to take legal action; even if some in the community may be openly pirating. Some however miss these opportunities thinking its just another instance of unlicensed usage.
Better defederate from all instances then.
Better to create your own instance then.
It’s about reducing risk not eradicating it and there’s a huge difference in risk in being targeted for legal action due to hosting c/piracy (via caching/mirroring) than from a single piracy post in c/hellokitty.