A post from r/apple explaining why they were forced to reopen their subreddit after planning to close indefinitely.
Quotes from the r/apple announcement:
Reddit’s asshole CEO u/spez made it clear that Reddit was not backing down on their changes but assured users that apps or tools meant for accessibility will be unharmed along with most moderation tools and bots. While this was great to hear, it still wasn't enough. So along with hundreds of other subreddits including our friends over at r/iPhone, r/iOS, r/AppleWatch, and r/Jailbreak, we decided to stay private indefinitely until Reddit changed course by giving third-party apps a fair price for API access.
Now you must be wondering, “I’m seeing this post, does that mean they budged?” Unfortunately, the answer is no. You are seeing this post because Reddit has threatened to open subreddits regardless of mod action and replace entire teams that otherwise refuse. We want the best for this community and have no choice but to open it back up — or have it opened for us.
NOTE: The URL linked to this post is a web.archive.org archive linked to a Libreddit instance to prevent Reddit from taking down that post from the internet + prevent giving Reddit direct traffic. Other links linked here go straight to Libreddit urls or to news articles. No links here lead directly to Reddit.
Libreddit is a third-party web client hosted by third-party servers.
Link to full post
EDIT: fixed grammar.
As far as I'm aware, this isn't necessarily true.
The DMCA sets out several requirements for eligibility for the "safe harbor" provisions, but they basically boil down to "you can't be the entity that posts infringing material, and you need to remove infringing material when notified of the infringement" plus some legal stuff around having a designated agent to receive complaints, etc.
Having the moderators be Reddit themselves doesn't present a problem here. If Reddit themselves start actually uploading infringing material, then they'd have no protection against a complaint on that material, but that's it.
Consider Twitter, YouTube, etc. All of them do 1st party moderation of copyrighted material, and they haven't lost their protection there either.