Submitted 1 year ago by DudePluto@lemmy.world to mildlyinfuriating@lemmy.world
https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/c/piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
cross-posted from: sh.itjust.works/post/2881638
The largest piracy community is hosted over at !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com
lemmy.world has blocked it. It appears to have also blocked !piracy@lemmy.ml.
If this is a problem for you, I’d suggest migrating accounts using LASIM to an instance that doesn’t block it (such as lemm.ee).
edit:
An official announcement has been made:
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.
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
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.
There’s a lot of people now who only came of age in the social media era. They’ve only ever known what it is to use a major platform.
Completely agree. This is definitely a smart move for lemmy.world in order to protect themselves. With that being said, switch instances if you want to see those communities. Do not fault a person, who already provides a free service, for trying to protect themselves.
I feel this is the fatal flaw of the lemmyverse. Before I heard about lemmy I was building my own similar system where you would subscribe to servers/instances specifically, without any cross instance caching. That way you will only see what you want to see, and if an instance gets overloaded they have to scale up, but won’t bring down your whole browsing in the meantime. It would be up to the client apps to aggregate all your instances/feeds to show you a list to doomscroll through, but you would have one account (activity pub compatible) to subscribe to them all with. If there were private, invite only communities for piracy then it wouldn’t legally jeopardize the rest of them either. I keep chipping away at it. One day I’ll publish is.
Eh. I’m a lawyer. I wouldn’t be afraid of the civil risk unless I was accepting donations. Suing regular people isn’t really a profitable endeavor. I’m more concerned about paying for the hosting and being subscribed to enough of the fediverse to have a representative instance.
Yeah, but Rudd probably doesn’t have the expertise or resources to swat away people that knock on his door with threats of litigation.
And there are a lot of dumb ass lawyers out there that have no problem lobbing threats and cease and desist over the wall. I know, I encounter them all the damn time.
There’s also those that sue for political reasons and not for money. Perhaps we need more lawyers to step up and offer their services pro bono to fediverse admins. The admins are volunteering their time for you. Might as well return the favor.
I don’t understand, what data from other instances is cached, exactly?
And usenet has existed since before the Internet itself, has been used for piracy almost as long, and yet I don’t see many concerns there.
If Alice, a user of lemmy server A, subscribes to a piracy group on server B, all content of that piracy community will be pulled to, cached on, and served to Alice through their home instance.
That’s a fair point. Anybody know of any servers hosted in countries where all this stuff is legal? I wouldn’t mind registering on the servers where my illicit interests are legal.
I see the decision you made as the ultimate end to this path you and lemmy world tread. At this rate all federations should defederate each other, or just shut down the whole fediverse. We can go back to individual hyper-specific forums on phbb again.
I mean there is obviously a line between what should federated and what should not. But i feel the reasoning here is fundamentally different then the others chosen in the past.
No one forces you to. What you do is called fear-mongering and catastrophizing. There are dozens of lawyers vigilling day and night and ready to pounce as someone uploaded child porn in your instance lol.
Not a surprise though, someone with passion for computers is an anxiety-ridden thingy
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.
I was going to bitch but read your comment and won’t be. You’re totally right, I didn’t even think about the points you made before getting annoyed.
Yeah, it really can’t be helped. The piracy community can always just shut down and congregate elsewhere. It’s significantly harder for a more general community to scatter and reform.
Yeah… Shit I guess that will be my first sub on my Lemm.ee account
Right? Regular people have regular problems. No need to add on-top of that.
One of the best parts is that you can migrate your subscriptions in probably less than 5 minutes now as well!
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 don’t 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.
Spoken like a true Darknet Diaries listener :)
I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you're going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it's an unfair battle from the start.
I can't blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There's a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it's protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.
I think people forget that decentralized doesn’t mean anonymous, and it also doesn’t mean that server admins and servers aren’t beholden to local laws
If you are hosting a discussion forum on a server that you are responsible for, does that automatically make you responsible for the content that people post on it? Even an instance the size of dbzer0 is impossible for a single person to moderate all of the content from the many communities that are federated with it. Impossible.
That’s like saying the admin of lemmy.world holds all of the wild political opinions that are posted on there.
When it comes to the legality of most things hosted on websites, that is how it works. The legality of piracy is different, for no reason.
Too many people in this thread are basically saying “discussing/assisting with piracy is illegal, move on” while having no opinion whatsoever on whether or not that is a just law. They just base their morality on what is legal and I SHOULDN’T HAVE TO SAY WHY THAT CAN BE PROBLEMATIC.
When feds come a knockin’? Fuck yeah it does mean you’re responsible for them, yeah man. Lmao. We just had our server admin purge some pervert agenda pusher. Because first off thats fucked up and next it could have the server seized.
Some dusty law enforcement won’t care if its just one bad apple. Especially if they get whiff that its a “community”.
yeah, a decentralized link aggregator just works!
Wtf dbzero was a huge proponent of the fediverse and has been a part of the recent swell in users. I don’t agree with this decision at all
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.
At least they just blocked the community instead of defederating
Would you mind explaining the difference?
I mean if you support illegally hosted material you can be forced to take down the website. As much as it sucks, piracy is illegal. Anyways, they haven’t defederated, just blocked that community.
In many jurisdictions what they’re doing there isn’t illegal at all. It is well understood that you do not post links out in the open.
Downloading isn’t illegal, sharing is. At least outside of the US (and a few others)
Only here because of my instance.
And here I thought that Fediverse was serious about being an alternative to heavily censored platforms. Now I see it’s just a joke.
The only thing it’s serious about us being a decentralized platform - if you want to access something, then choose an instance who’se admins are serious about being heavily censored.
It’s the old adage of “if you don’t like something, do something about it”
The fediverse gives you the tools and ability to surf the fediverse how you want, all through decentralization. Don’t like the rules on one instance? Move, simple as that.
It’s the same context of “vote with your wallet” - only put your accounts and time into instances you want to put your account on and only donate to instances you want to donate to, vote with your time and money, that’s how we can make this platform better, for ourselves and for others.
It’s not censorship, it’s just smart people protecting themselves from liability. Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.
That’s why I moved away from lemmy.world. I don’t want such admins.
Some things are clearly illegal and the admins should not be expected to take the heat for people who participate in those illegal activities.
But aren’t they protected under the same laws that other sites like Reddit are already protected under?
As far as being responsible for what their users post, last I heard that already had laws that protected the sites that hosted them so they were not responsible.
IANAL.
It’s not censorship, it’s a liability/legal issue.
This isn’t “the fediverse”, it’s a single instance.
You can move to a dedicated piracy instance or start your own.
Exactly
I just logged into my user from lemmy.dbzer0.com instead of .world
They banned the shrooms community too. So glad I never volunteered to help these people…
Not like you can’t access their community anymore
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.
This is fucking lame and will have a HUGE impact on Lemmy as a whole.
Sorry to be blunt, but this is an ignorant and dumb move. Nobody likes over-moderation.
👎
Well at least lemmy.world is starting to look more and more like shit. Can’t keep the servers up, keep defeding, absolute nonsense.
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.
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.
lemmy.world admins need a lesson on the Streisand Effect.
Despite reports I have decided to keep the comments open and the post up. I think removing this will only add fuel to the fire.
I don’t know why people feel indignated by this, they’re just trying to save thier ass and prevent future problems with the law. Chill out
Ok … do people not think that lawyers send out DMCA takedown notices and coerce police into taking into custody entire servers? Because lawyers send out DMCA takedown notices and coerce police into taking into custody entire servers…
I guess it would be Hetzner instances, news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470266, and it would be Hetzner who would get contacted and potentially shut down lemmy.world in their case. Let’s not even talk about the people launching DDoS’es against lemmy.world and how they could abuse it similarly.
It seems lemmy.world has only blocked communities, not entire servers in this case. I mean, get behind all the comments calling for a migration to “avoid instances moderated by clowns” and migrate all you want (wishing migrating was actually possible instead of simply creating new users), but I personally will stay in the server who has a code of conduct that considers legal concerns and doesn’t think that just because they are on the internet in a less popular medium that will eventually grow that it will get ignored.
I’ll just move if it gets taken down for incompetence or bogus reasons anyway, because all the dumb drama doesn’t really matter in the fediverse.
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”
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
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.
I love all the salty comments about having to move. Its piracy, it will always be removed if it becomes too popular. This is how it has always been and always will be. No one is obligated to feed you free shit without any effort on your part. They take one place down and you move on. Either get used to it or start paying for services.
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!
Who would win?
-the entire lemmy.world userbase.
Admins decide.
The nice thing about federation is that we can all go fuck ourselves and die alone on our personal private servers under a bridge.
Wow! Even Reddit hasn’t shut down the Piracy subreddit.
All for a request of a racist troll/disney bootlicker
Yay Lemmy.world, you kicked yourself in the dick, congrats.
Well, this is goodby to lemmy.world! Rest in pieces
Eh, so what? Migrate to another instance, lemmy.world is garbodge anyway
Who cares. Lemmy.world sucks. I got tired of the constant server issues and switched a while ago. It took me like 5 minutes to find another instance and create an account. If my new instance does dumb shit like this, I’ll just move again isn’t this the whole point of Lemmy?
The owners of the largest instance on Lemmy don’t want to potentially get into legal trouble.
Lemmy.world users: “omg wut about muh illegal downloads”.
leraje@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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.
traveler@lemdro.id 1 year ago
Exactly, he’s protecting himself.
CaptainEffort@sh.itjust.works 1 year ago
Protecting himself from what? The community hosts literally zero pirated content.
didntwemeetin2007@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’m confused, Are they actually hosting anything illegal?
SRo@lemmy.sdf.org 1 year ago
No. .world is just afraid of everything. Better they shut down their instance.
leraje@lemmy.world 1 year ago
Not sa far as I know.
moitoi@feddit.de 1 year ago
For me, it looks like people are mad at the US defaultism of the decision.
I understand why. It makes for part of the users no sense as they are protected by the law. It looks like a US “shitshow”. Countries are protecting the IP of the person, making it nearly impossible to pursue someone. Others have law allowing the use and the copy of copyrighted material for educational purposes. Some allow the download of copyrighted material.
It’s the same with GDPR. Meta must comply. There is no exception because US defaultism.
And we can understand this point of view too. It’s not binary as the US people think it is. It’s more mixed depending of the country.
Generally, outside of this drama, on the internet, people are reclaiming they right and don’t want the US “example” anymore. They want the internet following their local laws like the GDPR for Europeans. They have the right to claim it. Thanks to GDPR, mandatory usb-c, battery replacement and others laws in Europe and outside, the consciences of are awakened that the US is not the model to follow in terms of law on the internet and technologies.
FinallyDebunked@slrpnk.net 1 year ago
lemmy.world hosts in Finland hence they don’t probably live in us