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.
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.