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.
That’s the tricky part - if I write a book I might need the money from selling it to survive (and a lot of shop workers may rely on it too).
However, I think the copyright most people resent is the kind that stops you building on top of something without having a legal department handy. The overlong nature of copyright is also extremely problematic.
Copyblight is this in action - it’s a video strike by a legal department for showing 0.1 seconds too much audio, the killing of a free fan game, and the gating of knowledge a century old behind a journal paywall.
I think removing those claws, and reducing copyright duration somewhat would be the route forward.