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.
I’ll grant you that I may have used an overly absolute statement, and your example of the free distribution of scientific materials is a great counter-example. Maybe a better term is ‘morally grey’. The key point I wanted to make was just that in the majority of cases it is near impossible to argue that it is a ‘right’ thing to do. It’s not hard to see the more complex moral arguments sharing scientific studies, however I don’t think this really applies if we’re talking about an episode of Suits.
As for a system of ethics, to me this can be approached very simply. What would be the consequences of piracy if we all did it? At least for arts and entertainment, I don’t think there would be anything to pirate very quickly.