cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/2881638
The largest piracy community is hosted over at [email protected]
lemmy.world has blocked it. It appears to have also blocked [email protected].
If this is a problem for you, I’d suggest migrating accounts using LASIM to an instance that doesn’t block it (such as lemm.ee).
edit:
An official announcement has been made:
Despite reports I have decided to keep the comments open and the post up. I think removing this will only add fuel to the fire.
Some of the comments in here are a fucking disgrace and a disappointment.
I just shut down my own self-hosted instance the other week because of legal concerns. Caching anything and everything that gets pushed to my server and basically having to put all my faith in other admins taking care of illegal stuff in a timely manner was stressful and not worth the risk. And that was a solo instance!
It’s only a matter of time until lawyers backed by millions of dollar come knocking on the door of lemmy admins and I can’t fault lw for being pro-active. Whether or not it’s legal in your jurisdiction to host communities like this doesn’t matter at all if you’re not the one with a name attached to the server. Even wrongful legal claims by copyright holders are costly and time intensive to fight back against.
Why should a private person who hosts an instance for thousands of users for free subject themselves to such a risk?
It’s unfortunate, but it’s kinda understandable why they chose to do so. The admins are just a bunch of regular people, they may not have the financial security to risk the legal issues that could come from having any sort of piracy related content.
I guess I’ll just be using my alt acc for piracy stuff.
This is probably the best option for Lemmy.world. It’s not being run by a big company, after all. Normal people often get screwed when their servers have anything related to piracy on them.
Yeah. It objectively makes little sense that you can google/bing for pirated media and not from other indexes but companies like Google and Microsoft are basically untouchable. I think LW admins have little choice. If you look at the dude who shared Nintendo ROMs you can see that the court was out to set an example and left the services that made people find those ROMs completely alone.
Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?
Recently Nintendo closed a lawsuit where the person in question is basically doomed to a lifetime of financial ruin. He was to spend 3 years in prison but was released and owes Nintendo $10 million. Nintendo, the poor indie company, is now entitled to 25% up to 30% of his income for the rest of his life. Gary Bowser Vs. Nintendo.
His name is fucking Bowser!? He needs to sue Nintendo for infringing on his trademark
Hmm, an amount of $10 million to sue Nintendo for trademark infringement sounds fair.
Fuck Nintendo, jesus
In 2018, someone maintaining a ROM site was ordered to pay Nintendo $12 million.
In late 2021, someone was sentenced to 10 years of prison and to pay Nintendo $14.5 million. That person got out on good behavior last April, but 25-30% of their wages are going to be garnished until their debt to Nintendo is paid off - which will likely take the rest of their life.
Out of the loop, what Nintendo do?
Sued him (so far nothing irregular) and he has to pay 10 million dollars or something along this magnitude. Bottom line is, he will have to give a good portion of his income for the rest of his life to Nintendo. OK, that guy was kinda stupid and monetized the website through ads but the punishment is still super excessive for something that resulted in no bodily harm for anyone. Meanwhile, the ROM site could be googled and yet Google is still free to allow users to find pirated media. YouTube started as a video piracy platform (not officially, of course, but unlicensed uploads of popular videos were the reason YouTube grew so much). LW admins will not be granted the same luxury.
Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?
They sold a physical switch hacking device
Ah, looked more into it and yes, it appears I was mistaken. What got Bowser though is that it appears that they also set up access to roms though I don’t know if this was included in the purchase of the device.
This was from one of his e-mails:
“I [am] going to be busy setting up the ‘underground’ stuff (rompacks, coverarts, emulators) on maxconsole forums, that will also help on ‘grey side’ of the device for those wishing to play more than original snes cartridges,” Bowser wrote in an email quoted in the indictment against him.
“We have a plan in the works to have secure links to these retro rompacks on a protected server, so it will not be a problem,” Bowser said in another quoted email.
Didn’t they monetize the website through subscriptions?
Maybe, maybe not. I didn’t look up the exact details before writing because the overall point remains that courts punish individuals exceptionally hard for copyright offenses.
Great summary on this Episode of Darker Diaries from last week
Nintendo aggressively pursues copyright claims, often spuriously.
Here’s an article that has more details on what happened.
What Sega doesn’t
No, wait
Spoken like a true Darknet Diaries listener :)
I think people greatly underestimate the expense of legal disputes, in terms of money, time and energy required. When you’re going up against industry legal professionals who are backed by large companies with government influence, it’s an unfair battle from the start.
I can’t blame anyone for giving the possibility a wide berth, and it speaks to the need of more fediverse instances in places with better legal protections. There’s a good reason why some services are based in the Caribbean - it’s protection from the litigious easily fucking with your entire life with scattershot automated subpoenas.
I think people forget that decentralized doesn’t mean anonymous, and it also doesn’t mean that server admins and servers aren’t beholden to local laws
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Edit: Didn’t mean to ridicule any of you all. I based my comment on my experience when I signed up. At that time there were plenty of instances to pick from and getting approved at my instance of choice was very quick. My bad.
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
To give credit where it’s due, when the big Reddit migration happened many instances could not handle the influx of migrating users. Some people might have only had .world as an option.
Situation still sucks tho. Hope upcoming Lemmy updates make moving accounts between instances easier.
https://github.com/CMahaff/lasim is already a pretty easy option
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Maybe I didn’t have my crystal ball nearby when I was creating my Lemmy account.
Maybe many users will have an account on the largest server, because by definition it’s the largest server, with the most users. 🙄
It’s so easy to change instances, and there are extensions and things to export/import your subscriptions, etc. Just head over to one ones that’s hosting the content, or check out others to see if they will keep federated with the pirate communities. Make the same username, and most won’t even know that you’re posting from a different instance. You can still see everything you did before, just also possibly some other stuff. You might also get beehaw and hexbear (for better or for worse is up to you)! I feel like I might hop instances a few more times before I settle.
It’s so easy to change instances, and there are extensions and things to export/import your subscriptions, etc.
Hmmm
Okay, you’re not on Reddit anymore where things are just easy because they spent time to figure it out. Fediverse is just a fledging group of sites that are getting an influx of users, while still trying to figure out both their instance, and cooperative rules that fit both their values and the wants/needs of their users. You want a well oiled machine, jump back into the mainstream where they use your data to personalize the adds they place between all the things you want to see. Or, you can go with the flow as this new ecosystem forms, sans ads, and free of data collection.
It’s fine if you’re not ready.
I highly recommend opening a lurking account in one of the NSFW instances. They are probably some of the fastest, most progressive and best funded instances on Lemmy. You do not have to browse the NSFW content.
Also, they don’t ask for your email! A friend told me that.
I don’t think that makes sense if you’re worried about defederation. Porn instances are particularly at risk of being defederated from (and thus you potentially can’t interact with large communities).
No I swear I just have an account there for all the SFW stuff!!!
You are completely right, but account migration also needs to become available for situations like this.
I made my account here while waiting for the instance I actually wanted to come online
Maybe you shouldn’t even have had your account on the largest server to begin with?
Some of us made our accounts on lemmy.world within a week(?) of its creation when it was tiny (June 5 for me). Doesn’t stop it from belonging on mildly infuriating
I went with lemmy world so i could catch the widest net in content. And up till now i agreed with the reasoning of the other defederating.s But it seems like it won’t take much to provoke more restrictions. Guess i will have to lurk in other shores.
It was the only server that was accepting when I joined. I still have applications at a few, but never got approved. Signed up on startrek.website yesterday. I was motivated by the ddos more than any thing else.
Honestly, I just found this place first, and I don’t remember what I came here for. I didn’t make an account, then I did recently and now get approved. Lets goo. Options are great the advantage of the Fediverse is that you can always create a new server instance every time. Probably always changing your IP every time the server gets taken down and have none of the names associated with it are the same.
This is basically what I did not that long ago.
It wasn’t the largest when some of us joined…
There was 1000 people about when I signed up.
I don’t remember where it was for me, but I do remember it being the hop-on point for me into Lemmy because it was already well populated, so I figured it meant “good”. Now that I understand lemmy better, I’ve realized I don’t need to patron it anymore - there are better instances for me. I suspect that this is a good thing that something is causing users to move. I’m sure .world is the face of fediverse, or at least lemmy, for many at this point and will continue to grow in user base. Maybe losing users on the back end will satisfy the DDOS attackers, and also lighten the load while .world’s admin get it figured out.
Maybe this is a natural process of the fediverse?
Maybe this is a natural process of the fediverse?
on the mastodon side at least quite a few people started off on mastodon.social and migrated over to smaller instances (or in some cases migrated to entirely different software families like pleroma or misskey)
i’d go as far as to say (jokingly ofc) that you aren’t a true member of the fediverse if you didn’t migrate at least once
Situations like these are the strength of the fediverse. Move your account to an instance that shares your values or doesn’t care about stuff like this.
its not a bug, its a feature! the faceless admins get to tell you watch content you can get now, not a faceless corporations! its so good that all the instances are starting a war with each other over the content they host because it means we have the choice of who gets to decide what content we like to see!.
I can sense the sarcasm of your post, yet the words you’ve written are actually true. This is exactly what decentralisation is all about. on some other websites you might lose access to the content entirely, on the fediverse you can just go there direct and still get all of the content, nobody can ever take that away from you except for the people who manage that content.
That’s literally the main selling point of this kind of setup. Nobody, faceless or otherwise, can stop you accessing any of the content.
decentralize a centralized socialmedia format. amazing strategy.
They never even got a DMCA takedown notice or any sort of copyright claims. Just because one user asked. Wtf
Not only that, it was a brand new account on a totally different Lemmy instance that demanded lemmy.world admins remove piracy related communities.
Honestly it seems like lemmy.world admins were trolled by some random throwaway account and took the bait.
EDIT: The post in question in case others haven’t seen it https://lemmy.world/post/3175920, a new account from lemm.ee makes their first & only post in lemmy.world demanding that they defederate & remove anything piracy related.
Not even reddit admins were this stupid
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Understandable reason but there is not one illegally shared file in these communities. What’s next, watching a John Wick movie makes me a murderer now?
Lmao. What a shitshow
And now the account that redirected all of lemmy.world has been banned from lemmy.world for ban evasion.
This whole thing is weird
They should have asked them to change their rules instead. Sharing DL links can get the admin in trouble. LueLinks had to do away with it at one point too, and they were primo pirate site back in the day. I think reddit had r/piracy and other subs change their rules - the one that had links to mushroom spore sellers (forgot the name) had to stop sharing links to sellers that sold magic mushroom spores (not an illegal thing to do). It’s tough, but admin made guiding rules, and that breaks one of them. Plus, if it’s on their server, it could be admins head on the chopping block.
Are you talking about a different community or instance? [email protected] does not allow direct links to content yet lemmy.world admins blocked it anyway.
True but it hosted in Germany. That country does not take it easy on piracy…
Even the German specific Lemmy instances like https://feddit.de do not block the piracy discussion communities.
The piracy blocking stuff seems like something lemmy.world admins decided to do based on a troll from another instance demanding it.
That user can sue if they don’t obey, in most jurisdictions. If it comes that far, it’s too late.
I’m late to comment, so I may be typing into the void.
I understand the admin’s decision to limit their exposure to legal risk. I had similar experiences as a small business owner and you would be surprised how quickly most people’s idealism is tempered by the risk of potential legal action. It’s totally possible to believe strongly in the legality of something and its benefit to society (in this case piracy) and still choose to limit your own legal exposure. As far as I know, none of us paid to be here, so the polite thing to do is say “thank you for hosting us” and move on if it’s not your thing (or just make a second account).
I believe our current copyright/intellectual property scheme is broken at best, and designed to fuck us out of every bit of culture that has ever existed, at worst. Piracy exists because the system is broken and the industry is entrenched and refuses to adapt to customer demands. It screws music fans, artists, and probably the individual low-level employees of many music industry companies and organizations.
Given lemmy.world’s uptime vs how well pirates keep torrent seeds up, I’d be surprised if anyone in that community actually uses lemmy.world as a primary instance lmao
I love these comments. It shows the federation is working. If reddit did this it was “oh no what now” but with lemmy it’s just “time to move to another instance”
I just don’t like the idea of having 500 accounts after it’s all said and done, especially if most of them wind up being unused… unless I’m fundamentally doing something wrong by creating a new account on every instance I want to use?
I feel a little better about it if lemmy provided migration tools.
It certainly not the end of the world but it is kind of a pain in the ass.
Reddit has plenty of piracy communities, being more strict than reddit is is just unnecessary
And here I thought that Fediverse was serious about being an alternative to heavily censored platforms. Now I see it’s just a joke.
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People are missing the fundamental point of defederation. THIS IS A GOOD THING.
You can have an absolutely squeaky clean instance for memes, news and generally huge sharing communities. Instances that dont have to worry about DCMA notices or having their servers seized and you can have instances that are willing to run those risks for niche content. If legal threats start being thrown around, the meme and hobby communities dont suffer. The piracy instances can shut down, migrate and start again, making the lawyers play whackamole.
ikr…feels like I’m taking crazy pills here. this is federation at work.
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coerce police into taking into custody entire servers
Name instances where this has happened, other than on entire websites dedicated to piracy. And overzealous hosting providers who shut down entire servers over a single DMCA (especially when the site doesn’t appear to host any content) should be avoided.
But I agree that it’s his own instance and he should do what he wants with it; that’d be the beauty of federation.
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Did you miss the part “other than websites dedicated to piracy”? The kingpin was making 150k€/month from his piracy ring, not some guy running a small free message board.
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n total, 10 search warrants were issued and 14 people detained or accused of IP crimes, including four who were arrested in Spain. According to Europol, the prime suspect in this case had been earning €150,000 per month and lived in a luxury villa, drove expensive cars and took luxury holidays all over the world.
really coerced them through legal proceedings, damn.
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What’s the fucking point. The community isn’t even hosted on lemmy.world. I don’t want to have to create a new a account on a new instance every time a dumbass admin decices to block a community I follow. Lemmy is doomed to fail.
Why are so many people still on Lemmy world. We’re supposed to be decentralized. One of the benefits to decentralization is that you can choose to avoid blocks like this. Stop centralizing!
piracy is the only remaining counter force to the full blown mega corp monopolies that have full price control and right now showing us that with their way above inflation extraction antics.
It’s sad it has come to this but given failure to regulate and the concentration and capture of almost everything by these companies rent seeking everyone really requires some kind of counterbalance.
I’m guessing LW is also prepping for a shareholder sellout down the road.
