Lemmy.world has somehow decided to become to extreme defenders of “copyright” and decided they will now delete posts that contain archive links in an absurd move that not even corporate websites like Reddit do. Archive links provide a service to provide access to an article long after it is deleted or changed.
They made this post and locked it immediately so no one can comment on how ridiculous it is and they’re deleting threads about the decision…
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6711646
The LW admins have requested that communities remove any posts that include the entire article or archive links to articles.
A short summary is allowed, but large segments of articles posted in the body will result in the post being removed. This includes links to sites that rehost copyrighted articles for paywall sites.
If your post is removed for a rule 1 violation you can edit the post and let the moderators know the copyrighted material has been removed.
Thanks All!
This is total BS and people are upvoting it just because it sounds truthy.
Piracy links? Yeah, sure.
Archive links? Like OP said, even corporate Reddit allows those. The risk to a Lemmy instance from allowing this is literally zero. There is a rule of lawsuits among lawyers that you always look for the deep pockets because you can’t get anything from a lawsuit if the defendant can’t pay. There is no way Lemmy.world would be sued for this before Reddit, which actually has money to pay with. That’s even setting aside the notion that linking to archives could be found to constitute copyright infringement.
Not that I agree that removing/banning archive links is sensible, but reddit has a much bigger budget for lawyers than any instance admin, so is in a much safer position with grey-area and black-area-but-no-one-complained-yet content. It’s not like reddit was ever particularly anti-piracy, either - the corporate interests they bowed to were advertisers and their shareholders.
They won’t waste time on lemmy over this. They’ll send cease and desist letters if they care enough. Ignoring those would lead to a suit, but assuming people are immediately going to be dragged into court over the actions being discussed here is on the farfetched side. Even those lawyers and paralegals on retainer have a cost per man hour, so dealing with finding out who a Lemmy instance operator is and drafting the legalese is going to have to be a worthwhile effort for them over some article links.