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:
- !piracy@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !steamdeckpirates@lemmy.dbzer0.com,
- !piracy@lemmy.ml, and their local counterparts as follow up actions.
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
❤️
That’s nice of them to walk it back. Definitely not something you’d see Reddit do
Yeah, it was a nice surprise for sure. I’m glad to have the lemmy.world crowd back, plenty of booty for all.
Dbzer0 is one of the few I have seen making Lemmy better and better.
The amount of people in here claiming there were no takedown requests is a bit frustrating. As if we were blocking those communities for shits and giggles. Sure there was that Bungie troll but around the same time we DID get a takedown request for threads in the piracy community. 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.
We were also considering different hosting options to counter those DDOS attacks back than and that would mean moving the server to another country and thus exposing members of our team to legal issues should shit hit the fan. One of our team members back then was in the legal team for the hosting company we were considering moving to. So he wasn’t just making this up, he literally wrote the rules.
In the end we decided not to move to that hosting company. And we took some other measures by creating some tooling to deal with this stuff better. And that takes time.
Undoing the block means more work for us too. Work we do for free on our own time, next to having jobs and a families. And we’re definitely not a corporate entity with fancy lawyers.
Hi Antik, as I mentioned elsewhere in the comments, I was very happy to hear that you decided ‘unremove’ our little community. I appreciate you going to the effort of revisiting the earlier decision and being transparent about the process, and I’m sure that goes for the vast majority of the people here (though obviously not all 🤨).
While individual users were probably more impacted by that decision than we were as a instance (because they couldn’t access this community from lemmy.world), I can tell you that our admin team fully understood the situation you were in and there are no hard feelings from our side.
I don’t know whether there is a wider appreciation of the fact that managing a lemmy instance is quite labor intensive and technically challenging for the system admins, who are all volunteering their time and expertise. And there’s still lots of bugs and problems to identify and deal with.
Hey Unruffled. I know you had your opinion back when we made that unpopular move too ;) But whatever the users here might think, the contact between most instance admins over on the matrix channels is pretty good and helpful. We might not all allign all the time but there is always respect and understanding. And I think you can confirm that everyone just tries to help each other there no matter what the differences.
I contacted db0 soon after we blocked those communities and have always been in good contact with him since. He understood our situation very well. And as you know yourself Lemmy World has been very active and very publicly pushing the fediseer project. Again, we have our differences but we all want Lemmy to succeed.
Appreciate you dude!
Can you post the DMCA notice you received? It should include what the copyright material was which would be interesting given it was discussion only.
Hmm, so you say there was a DMCA takedown notice but that the thread contained no material or links to material. You also say you can’t provide evidence of it even happening. Yeah, I’m going with you didn’t actually receive one and are just trying to retroactively come up with a good reason.
I’m curious what the takedown requests were citing, those communities don’t really host pirated material, they just share links and info.
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.
There are international agreements about copyright law designed specifically that prevent the loophole you’re thinking of.
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.
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.
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.
Lemmy.world has a bad habit of acting preemptively first and asking questions later.
So they finally realized the person that convinced them to block the piracy subs was an idiot transphobic troll who was unhealthily obsessed with defending bungie, a faceless game corporation that needs no defense?
Shocker.
They state legal reasons, which makes sense. Better check things and be safe. Are there any more details etc. available about what you claim?
From a legal standpoint, I sort of get it. One risk of the fediverse is that data is cached locally from federated servers. That could put server owners in legal jeopardy for hosting illegal content. However, if the server is actively moderated and owners respond responsibly to take down requests, they should be okay - in the US at least, and assuming current protections for service providers remain intact.
I think a good option (if technically feasible) could be to have the choice to de-cache communities or servers that are questionable and make it so that data is transmitted live from the federated server when requested by a client. That would add load to both the local and federated servers though, especially if volume is high.
One risk of the fediverse is that data is cached locally from federated servers. That could put server owners in legal jeopardy for hosting illegal content.
This 100%. And not just piracy-related stuff.
Tbh, there have been some decisions by lemmy.world admins that i didn’t really support, but this one is understandable imo.
I wonder if the lemmy devs are aware of this and what steps can be taken to protect the instance owners from stuff in other instances that can get them in trouble.
Dbzer0 made that public right after the block occured, the person created a new acxount on lemmy.world with no posts just to retaliate. Not sure how much trueth is behind their new claims that they got multiple takedown requests but for some reason I was insulted for not knowing never mentioned or published, would certainly be a better reason but conaideringtheir past behaviour and complete lack of aknowledgment I am not too sure about that tbh.
