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.
This is an inaccurate statement. Looking just at US law (there’s plenty of others), CDN’s that reside or operate within the US are required to comply with DMCA takedowns and any other legal requests made of them. Failure to do so jeopardizes their protection under Section 230 of the DCMA. They 100% can be held civilly and criminally liable for what’s in their cache. The US provides a pass, by law, as long as they maintain due diligence.
That’s actually very similar to what this story about Reddit was all about. The film studios were trying to build a case to have RCN stripped of their S230 protections.