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Lemmy.world seems to have banned the largest piracy community on Lemmy. (lemmy.dbzer0.com)

submitted 7 months ago* (last edited 7 months ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:

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.

https://lemmy.world/post/3234363

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[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago (1 children)

this seems equivalent to banning a cybersecurity community because encryption get used by bad actors sometimes, so discussion of staying anonymous online needs to be banned

using your analogy; it's like banning access to a piracy community because sometimes pirates use it..

pirates sometimes use meme communities too, but those aren't banned, and .world isn't completely defederated from db0, so that's not it.

so discussion of staying anonymous online needs to be banned since information about staying anonymous online is "sharing the tools and techniques" that could be used in assisting criminal activity.

staying anonymous online is not a crime though. copyright infringement is a crime. that's why the analogy doesn't make sense.

scenario is: people are linking to law-breaking content in x-community. therefore, .world is choosing to ban said x-community that facilitates it, to prevent legal liability.

I understand the need to draw the line at actually sharing copyrighted content, but discussion of lockpicks or linking to sites that sell lockpicks is not equivalent to going around illegally picking locks, except it seems that is exactly the case when it comes to piracy but no other topics.

you're right, while lock picking can be illegal, it's not always illegal. however, copyright law violations are always illegal.

this law-breaking content happens to be copyright infringement/piracy material. another example a host might ban would be a community that is linking to CP, or a community that is linking to Identity theft sources, etc. even if it's just users posting links to this sort of content, I can understand a host not wanting to expose themselves to any sort of legal liability.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 7 months ago

I think we're close to saying the same thing, I'm in total agreement that linking to illegal content should be banned, it's the uneven enforcement of that principle across communities that I think is an issue. I know .world isn't hosted in the US, so you don't enjoy broad 1st Amendment protections for free speech, but does anyone really think that discussing crime is itself a crime? If I say "here's a scenario for how a group of people could rob a bank" what crime is that? If I say "hey I think there's people dealing drugs on this street corner" what crime is that? And I can of course appreciate a host not wanting to expose themselves to any sort of legal liability, that's their free choice, they own the server. I'm talking about, on principle, what's wrong with allowing a community to exist so long as that community does not post or link to illegal content? That principle seems to work just fine for virtually every other topic but when it comes to discussion of filesharing, torrents, and the like, then suddenly the "don't link to illegal content" principle isn't good enough and it becomes "we must ban this entire concept for our own safety." That's the admins' right and I have no issue if they want to do that, I just want to point out the glaring double standard between moderating communities so they don't break the rules and banning communities so they don't break the rules.