Might be worth remembering here that Lemmy instances, including .world are hosted by regular people. Not massive multinational companies worth billions who can engage the best legal talent around.
If Hollywood comes after a Lemmy instance, Holywood have a huge legal team and endless money. The Lemmy instance has some guy. They could quite literally destroy a persons life. With that in mind, I don't blame any instance owners for erring on the side of taking a stance that won't put them in the legal firing line.
Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.
I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!
It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.
Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?
The entitlement is ridiculous, especially when you can easily switch to another instance and the "problem" is solved. If this was a corporate site, that would be impossible to do.
But obviously that's too much work and it's easier to just be a crybaby.
This really isn’t all that different from old school forums and the way they were run. Have people forgotten what those were like? That’s one of the biggest reasons I like the direction of Lemmy to begin with. The owner of the site can’t assume those risks, they’re not a corporation.
I agree, very sad to see the comments in here. the instance owners don't really have much choice in this matter considering there's no easy tools right now on Lemmy to deal with legal issues and they'd likely end up having to shut down completely if they did nothing
It's unfortunate, but it's kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I'll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
[–]hanke@feddit.nu220 points2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago)
(21 children)
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn't care about stuff like this.
Maybe you shouldn't even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Edit: Didn't mean to ridicule any of you all. I based my comment on my experience when I signed up. At that time there were plenty of instances to pick from and getting approved at my instance of choice was very quick. My bad.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn't stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.
Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.
Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.
EDIT: The post in question in case others haven't seen it https://lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.
Remember that lemmy.world has to keep a copy of whatever content appears in a federated community on their servers, making them legally liable for the content. At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating.
I'm late to comment, so I may be typing into the void.
I understand the admin's decision to limit their exposure to legal risk. I had similar experiences as a small business owner and you would be surprised how quickly most people's idealism is tempered by the risk of potential legal action. It's totally possible to believe strongly in the legality of something and its benefit to society (in this case piracy) and still choose to limit your own legal exposure. As far as I know, none of us paid to be here, so the polite thing to do is say "thank you for hosting us" and move on if it's not your thing (or just make a second account).
I believe our current copyright/intellectual property scheme is broken at best, and designed to fuck us out of every bit of culture that has ever existed, at worst. Piracy exists because the system is broken and the industry is entrenched and refuses to adapt to customer demands. It screws music fans, artists, and probably the individual low-level employees of many music industry companies and organizations.
Given lemmy.world's uptime vs how well pirates keep torrent seeds up, I'd be surprised if anyone in that community actually uses lemmy.world as a primary instance lmao
I love these comments. It shows the federation is working. If reddit did this it was "oh no what now" but with lemmy it's just "time to move to another instance"
People are missing the fundamental point of defederation. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
You can have an absolutely squeaky clean instance for memes, news and generally huge sharing communities. Instances that dont have to worry about DCMA notices or having their servers seized and you can have instances that are willing to run those risks for niche content. If legal threats start being thrown around, the meme and hobby communities dont suffer. The piracy instances can shut down, migrate and start again, making the lawyers play whackamole.
What's the fucking point. The community isn't even hosted on lemmy.world. I don't want to have to create a new a account on a new instance every time a dumbass admin decices to block a community I follow. Lemmy is doomed to fail.
Why are so many people still on Lemmy world. We're supposed to be decentralized. One of the benefits to decentralization is that you can choose to avoid blocks like this. Stop centralizing!
piracy is the only remaining counter force to the full blown mega corp monopolies that have full price control and right now showing us that with their way above inflation extraction antics.
It’s sad it has come to this but given failure to regulate and the concentration and capture of almost everything by these companies rent seeking everyone really requires some kind of counterbalance.
I’m guessing LW is also prepping for a shareholder sellout down the road.
Turns out finding a good lemmy instance is a huge pain in the ass. I started on lemmy.ml but it was full of tankies so I moved to lemmy.world now they banned piracy so I'm on lemm.ee which gets a lot of crap from tankies still, not as bad as lemmy.ml but it's really fucking annoying. Like I'm not interested in Russian propaganda or how the soviet union's genocide was justified actually, please give the user a way to block all tankies and nazies and stop blocking things globally for everyone.
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