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.
Again, lots of rationalizations for taking stuff without paying. Can I ask you what you do for a living and if you think whatever product or service it is should be provided by you for free?
For a living, I mostly write software and do research in mathematics, and yes it should be free. I don’t necessarily say that there should not be an option to pay for using it for business purposes, but in my opinion it should always be possible to easily and legally get it for personal use. I cannot share the code directly due to NDA’s, but it still should be public and accessible for any physical persons.
And an important thing I forgot to mention: you assume that piracy is some invisible force that makes customers not buy the product and inflicts purely theoretical losses to the company, while in reality the vast majority of pirates would not buy the product anyways, and some (like me) have bought hundreds of e.g. games, just because they liked the pirates version. Some studies have shown that piracy has a positive net influence on the number of sold copies. Saying that piracy loses sales is just a stupid rhetoric used by greedy callous companies to raise prices even more, though the product does not change.
So you don’t collect a salary for the work you do?
I do, but do note that all public research is funded somehow, though importantly it is public, so free to access. This is my idea of how all research should be conducted.
I agree, public research is usually funded by government grants, which means paid for by our taxes, and so it’s for public benefit. That’s a pretty special case, and only applies to a tiny percentage of jobs.
Most people make ends meet by working a job that ultimately is funded by the sale of a product or service.
Sale of revokable for any reason at all licenses to access digital content should be a crime, not piracy. This content can be infinitely reproduced with no harm to the owner, in fact in most cases the owner doesn’t even know that you specifically copied the content. I completely agree that everyone should support creators they like, but I completely disagree that it should be compulsory on often whatever terms the author comes up with to extort as much money as they can.