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.
Because in German jurisdiction, linking to illegal content can bring with it fines. It’s ridiculous, but that’s where we are, more specifically we have a lawyer who is insanely prolific at sending out legal threats and asking for ridiculous amounts of money for this.
And now the problem: Due to the way ActivityPub works, one instance “pulls” the links posted on another instance to itself. At that point,
lemmy.worldis hosting links to content XYZ, not the other instance. Hence they’d be legally actionable. And being the largest instance of lemmy, this is the one any lawyer firm wanting to make quick bucks or any music industry wanting to appear like they’re doing anything worth all the money to their consitutents would go after this one, not any other instance.The protocol is a bit of a double-edged sword: Yes you’re not hosting the content, but if links can be fined then those get pulled over essentially without you being able to do shit about it.
The problem is that these communities never linked to any form of illegal content. It’s against their rules to do so. So no laws were being broken.
Then why the hell would you host anything instance in Germany?
Because you might be - and I know this can surprise some - a German?
Among other things it makes a lot of things easier. For example, assume you get sued for something with your server that you’re hosting in, say, Sweden. Now you need a lawyer both in Germany and in Sweden (most likely, though one in Sweden might be enough depending on what is happening) to handle the case, as usually the swedish lawyer defending you will want to talk to legal representation of yours over where you live. Not exactly making it any better, is it?
Of course, you could host your server on some utterly remote place no one can viably take you to court, but then they could still sue you (personally, as the person running the place) in your home country anyways, so it’s not like you get around anything this way.