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.
The response is so overwhelmingly negative because these are communities that exist on all other social media sites. Lemmy.world has gone far beyond any legal requirement (likely because there is no one running this instance with any understanding of the law whatsoever) and kicked people out who were breaking no laws on this site. Of course that’s going to engender a wildly negative response.
Nobody collects statistics on the reasons people break copyright laws for what should be obvious reasons: people don’t want to break laws publicly and go on record as doing it. Those that would are likely to skew data in some way, as they’re the dumb pirates.