The original /r/piracy was purposefully gimped because Reddit received DMCAs for any random thing and didn't even bother to follow up. Since we're in new waters, I want things to be a bit more relaxed, but there's a limit on how relaxed we can be, without starting to get lawsuits, which I will not be able to fight off. I also host other communities and interests which might cause me headaches.
Remember, this is a hobby project (and none of you scurvy dogs are donating) :D
So here are some piracy-related ground rules for he whole of lemmy.dbzer0.com as of today
- No direct links. This means anything which would make Nintendo or Disney light my ass on fire. I am not going to ban you for it (unless you start doing this on purpose), but I will ask admins and mods to remove them.
- You can link to websites pages related to piracy. Linking to websites linking to your content (not with a 301 redirect, before you ask) is OK. In general try to keep one degree of separation between our collective groins and your links.
- Magnet Links and links to Torrent files are OK, unless we start getting into trouble for it.
- /c/piracy has its own, more restrictive rules. Follow them first when they differ from what I post here! /c/piracy is for generic discussion, I don't want it to turn into a link repository full of beggars, got it?
- These rules apply to all pirate communities in lemmy.dbzer0.com. Unless that community has more restrictive rules from its own mods. I can easily get a lawsuit because you start making a nintendo ROM link repository.
- You can still post direct links elsewhere: If you want a place to post direct links, I suggest you use a community on a server setup to handle this. This requires some significant investment in anonymity and hosting provider (these providers are 3x as expensive, yo!). You can still subscribe and share from those communities with your account in lemmy.dbzer0.com, which can serve as your "port of safety" as those lemmies could be taken down due to those links. If that happens, this safer community will still be up.
All in all, this lemmy is supposed to be Pirate-allied, but not a direct link repository. I literally cannot handle that legal risk at the moment. I hope you all understand the realities of our situation. As much as we can argue that a link to a file is not infringing, the Cartel's legal fund is bottomless, and all I have is a tinsy-tiny treasure chest under my birdbath.
If any pirate communites need to migrate after this, I understand. I would still suggest you keep them around as the "safe" community, and post your link aggregation on a lemmy instance which can handle the eye of sauron. This way you get both a stable community and account, and your links via fediverse. Win-win.
Something I've seen is encoding links and sending people to https://www.base64decode.org/. Whether that alleviates legal risk is questionable (unlikely?), but it does prevent scraping for keywords.
Yeah the megalinks community’s new forum does that extensively, seems to keep links alive and untroubled for a long time.
I feel the link system is stronger. They could discover the tool and add it to their scraper, but having it follow one link and use another is likely harder for them to accomplish.