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.
What makes you think any of these individual instance owners have the legal representation to provide them locally relevant legal information? Let alone the money to play fuck around and find out with the abusive media companies?
Caching is an automatic function and very likely not considered infringement in this scenario, no more than the copy your computer makes for images on websites is copyright infringement.
I can’t help notice that you ignored the point about how there hasn’t actually been any evidence of linking infringing content from those communities. Without that, the ins and outs of whether caching would be considered copyright infringement is putting the cart before the horse.
Additionally, a simple takedown request would be the first step, so even if all your incorrect assumptions were true, it still wouldn’t result in any negative outcome for LW or its admin staff.
Edit: I do appreciate the edit, but I’m leaving my comment as is.