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.

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[–] Belkor@lemmy.world 28 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

How does Reddit get away with hosting these communities without the mentioned issues?

[–] flop_leash_973@lemmy.world 36 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

Because Reddit has a legal team on retainer, and a budget for litigation.

And they recently had to use them: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2023/08/reddit-beats-film-industry-wont-have-to-identify-users-who-admitted-torrenting/

Imagine how that same thing would have gone but with lemmy.world instead of Reddit. Being permissive about discussions on how to commit blatantly illegal activity can be expensive.

[–] AlmightySnoo@lemmy.world 27 points 1 year ago

They aren't, just a recent example: https://torrentfreak.com/filmmakers-take-reddit-to-court-again-to-unmask-piracy-commenters-230621/

But they have good lawyers. LW admins don't have the same means. It doesn't even matter whether you're "right" or "wrong" here and that's what the pro-piracy advocates here miss.