cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/6018317

Hello World!

As we’ve all known and talked about quite a lot, we previously blocked several piracy-focused communities. These communities, as announced, were:

In our removal announcement, we stated that we will continue to look into this more in detail, and re-allow these communities if and when we deem it safe. It was a solid concern at the time, because we were already receiving takedown requests as well as constant attacks, and didn’t want to put our volunteer team at risk. We had zero measures in place, and the tools we had were insufficient to deal with anything at scale.

Well, after back and forth with some very cool people, and starting to have proper measures as well as tooling to protect ourselves, we decided it’s time to welcome these communities back again. Long live the IT nerds!

We know it’s been a rough ride with everything, and we’d like to thank every one of you who were understanding of us, and stayed with us all the way. Please know that as users, you are what makes this platform what it is, and damned we be if we ever forget it.

With love, and as always, stay safe in the high seas!

Lemmy.world Team

❤️

  • Dom PooseEnglish
    54·
    9 months ago

    I’m curious what the takedown requests were citing, those communities don’t really host pirated material, they just share links and info.

      • danc4498@lemmy.worldEnglish
        34·
        9 months ago

        Not sure if DMCA requests matter to a server hosted in Germany, though.

        Also, as they mentioned, their admins were overworked as is and probably just needed time to go through the requests to see that they’re all bullshit.

      • Venia SilenteEnglish
        41·
        9 months ago

        Threads that didn’t even include direct links, it was just a discussion. Whatever you guys think, it was a lot of shit to deal with on top of what we were already dealing with.

        Only if they are legal requests, which in the case of a request to ban discussion, isn’t.

        (And that is why one usually has a legal canary and a policy to publish any and all DMCA requests received, as I’ve seen some orgs do. Helps put the trolls on the spotlight and quickly detect unlawful usage)

        The team could have perfectly asnwered by not doing anything at all, waiting a day or two to file a counternotice. Unfortunately the system is stacked in favour of the big pharmas of media, but it’s not like there is nothing that can be done.

        • db0@lemmy.dbzer0.comMEnglish
          2·
          9 months ago

          It’s not that simple. A lot of the times these DMCAs are not sent to your instance email, they’re sent to your provider’s and they don’t give a fuck. They will tell you, “remove it, or we take down your whole server and all data in it”. You can send a DMCA counternotice sometimes, but eventually if you get enough bogus DMCAs, some providers just terminate your service anyway due to their hassle. It’s fucked up and the reason why lemmy.dbzer0.com had to change providers to someone more hostile to bogus-DMCAs.

    • Brickfrog@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      233·
      9 months ago

      There weren’t any, it was just a troll account that asked admins at a bunch of different Lemmy instances to block anything related to piracy. Lemmy.world admins took the bait. Even in the original announcement they never mentioned anything about dealing with tons of takedown requests. In other words they were blocking piracy related content preemptively before any takedowns occurred.

      It’s nice they walked back that decision but I’m still not going to create an account there.

        • Confused_Emus@lemmy.worldEnglish
          5·
          9 months ago

          Considering the Fediverse is new territory, legally speaking, I can sympathize with a bit of extra caution from instance hosts who don’t have a team of lawyers backing them up.

      • Antik 👾@lemmy.worldEnglish
        67·
        9 months ago

        Thanks for your insight, you obviously know what you are talking about. Can I have your sources on this please?

    • wintrparkgrl@beehaw.orgEnglish
      6·
      9 months ago

      The companies don’t care if they have legal grounds. The threat of legal fees are enough to make most places comply