Ok ... do people not think that lawyers send out DMCA takedown notices and coerce police into taking into custody entire servers? Because lawyers send out DMCA takedown notices and coerce police into taking into custody entire servers...
I guess it would be Hetzner instances, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32470266, and it would be Hetzner who would get contacted and potentially shut down lemmy.world in their case. Let's not even talk about the people launching DDoS'es against lemmy.world and how they could abuse it similarly.
It seems lemmy.world has only blocked communities, not entire servers in this case. I mean, get behind all the comments calling for a migration to "avoid instances moderated by clowns" and migrate all you want (wishing migrating was actually possible instead of simply creating new users), but I personally will stay in the server who has a code of conduct that considers legal concerns and doesn't think that just because they are on the internet in a less popular medium that will eventually grow that it will get ignored.
I'll just move if it gets taken down for incompetence or bogus reasons anyway, because all the dumb drama doesn't really matter in the fediverse.
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.
That's basically the WWW in a nutshell, applied to the fediverse. The problem usually is when they start going after the people and not the sites.
What matters more is the country the people and the infrastructure are being hosted on, since that tends to determine which laws apply. The Pirate Bay has been able to continue existing because of how Sweden allows content aggregators like it to exist.
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.
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.
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.