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.
I think there are other things here worth considering about your comment. One of the biggest things I see Lemmy talk about is security and privacy. You can be against the action but in reality imagine the feds are tracking down those institutions. They can supeona Lemmy or request data from Lemmy servers and now regular people are exposed.
Even if it is just hosting a link the other concern an admin might need to have is how long before those links the problem legally is that Lemmy can be potentially charged.
https://kellywarnerlaw.com/linking-to-pirated-content-law
There are plenty of ways you are legally at fault if not handled correctly. In theory, Lemmy could be charged for allowing the adverisement of pirated content. I understand how Lemmy users feel about fucking over big companies because they don’t want to pay to some big corporation that has fucked them over and doesn’t care about the end user. However, I find those same Lemmy users to be a bit hypocritical. We already have writers and film makers on strike for being paid inadequately. While the idea is to change the viewpoint of big companies and stealing money from them is a win to some people. This also impacts those same writers and producers and this is true throughout any industry. If you steal from it even if you think you are doing damage to the big company you aren’t helping the good folk. Even if you don’t give a shit about those people and think they are a part of the problem.