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.
Yup. Absolutely cowardly. I very much doubt they talked to a decent lawyer. A lot of lawyers (perhaps most) out there will give you dumb opinions, like, “Oh, that sounds a bit wishy-washy to me. I would advise it.” Without actually properly sitting down and saying, “Yes it’s illegal (or no it’s not) in this jurisdiction, based on this interpretation of the law. There have been some cases that suggest this interpretation, etc.”
That’s not to say the answer is always possible to know. Maybe there hasn’t been any similar cases to test some legal interpretation. But the moment these people trot out vague moralizing answers or answers that seem too simple you know they’re full of it.
A lot of things are possible if you talk to a decent lawyer that has metaphorical big balls.