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.
Because of the way Lemmy works, all content from federated instances is mirrored (minus images). So technically, all the piracy content also lives on lemmy.world, which makes them liable for it.
So the images, video, etc isn’t cached here, it’s just text and links? Sites generally aren’t liable for what is on the other side of links, they just have to remove the link if they are notified by the copyright holder that it’s infringing their rights.
I’m sure individual instance owners have robust legal teams for handling and processing an untold number of takedown requests.
If they want to air on the safe side, as they appear to here, they can just auto-approve any takedown request. Just as robust a legal protection, while still allowing more content to be online.