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.
It’s a precept of law that you actually have to have standing to pursue a lawsuit. An arbitrary “rights holder” can’t successfully pursue a lawsuit on the grounds that people are speaking about a type of action that could hypothetically affect them, at least not in the US.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standing_(law)
Edit - Guess lemmy.world is in Germany, but shouldn’t be too different.
In Germany, linking to legally problematic content can itself see you facing fines, in one of the shittiest legal developments in years other than not banning the AfD.
So yeah, I can totally see them rather avoid all exposure.
And in Germany music rights are mostly all centralized in one umbrella organization, so they can trivially declare they’re affected. (fuck the music industry, but that’s besides the point)
The unfortunate reality is that the arbitrary “rights holders” have leveraged their held rights to gain a lot of money, unlike the maintainers of lemmy.world, which don’t have a bunch of cash lying around.
In this day and age, money can create allegations to drown someone in lawyers, and just defending against such allegations, regardless of their validity, can be prohibitively expensive.
That’s kind of true in general but not sure the MPAA etc. are known for blasting out spurious lawsuits quite like that. That can land you in hot water as well.