I agree with the mods’ decision, because they have to CYA. Whether a law is right or not is immaterial, they need to protect themselves and Lemmy.world from being taken down by law enforcement, web hosts, or what have you. At the end of the day, “morality” (which we all disagree on) simply doesn’t matter - but material consequences do.

However - piracy is not stealing. Stealing means depriving someone else of something. Cf, “You wouldn’t download a car” - which was hysterical, because of course you would, if it was free and deprived no one of anything.

And is it morally wrong? You assert that like it’s a fact, but obviously many people disagree. What formal system of ethics are you, personally, basing your morals on? Christ? I don’t remember intellectual property mentioned in the Bible. Kant? Maybe - in a world with a categorical imperative to pirate, there might be less incentive to produce piratable content. But I’m not necessarily convinced, because stories, songs, and art all existed prior to the invention of copyright.

Piracy is just copying data around. The moral or ethical implications of that are a matter of personal belief and social norms, which have informed the creation of law (and vice versa). But the history of IP is a lot more complicated than simply “enforcing morality”.

If copyright law had existed contemporaneously with the advent of the printing press,the dissemination of books to the masses would have been much slower and more expensive, and we would likely not have seen the huge jump in literacy across Europe at the time. Once copyrights (called “monopolies”) started to be granted they were not used to protect authors, but were weaponized as tools of censorship, suppressing works seen as subversive. Additionally, they were often granted as privileges to the landed gentry and those in favor with the ruling elite, further consolidating power and control over information and knowledge.

Some people believe that piracy, especially of scientific studies and materials that subvert harmful power structures, is not only moral - but a positive good for society, by democratizing access to information. I think that’s hard to argue with. Of course, not all piracy meets such lofty criteria, but I think it bears more examination than simply dismissing all piracy as “morally wrong”.

What even is your point? Does one protester’s desire for violence justify the Chinese government’s violence?

I’ve never heard about this drama, but I also intentionally didn’t follow the game too closely so I can go into it relatively blind. This sounds strange to me, though.

As far as I’m concerned, there are many ways to play video games, and many ways to play D&D, and none of them are “wrong” (as long as they don’t harm real life people in some way). If you want to minmax then go for it, that is a valid way to play.

As a “Johnny” in the MtG sense I like to play broken/unintuitive/combo type characters. Not necessarily minmaxing, since it’s not just about efficiency, but…efficient creativity. So I’m looking for a build that’s “fun” in an unusual way, viable, but not necessarily “optimal”.

Before you’re going to launch a tirade about the absolute necessity to be progressive diverse non-fascist

I’m going to regret asking this, but… What?

That’s kind of the inverse of “confidence”, which is a requested feature for comment sort.

What I do not understand about this take is that they can already collect all of this data, today. They don’t need to federate with the rest of the Fediverse to scrape basically all of the data they want. The only problematic thing they’d need an instance for is linking votes to users - which is something they could do just by spinning up a Lemmy instance. And they probably shouldn’t be able to, Lemmy should try to figure out a way to anonymize votes.

Threads joining the Fediverse does not significantly increase their ability to collect data about existing Fediverse denizens.

They already can access all if your data in the fediverse. They don’t need their own platform to do that.