After a thread was made in [email protected] asking to defederate from lemmy.dbzer0.com for “the facilitation of piracy, and copyright infringement in general which is illegal”, the admins of lemmy.world deleted it prompting discussions on !asklemmy[@]lemmy.ml and !piracy[@]lemmy.dbzer0.com.
This is the system that the EFF is endorsing - the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a non-profit for defending civil liberties.
By registering a DMCA agent for your site, you get to tell people who are saying “there’s copyrighted material on your site that you are hosting” to fill out the proper forms that includes their name and address and a bunch more information that they are authorized to act on behalf of the copyright holder. If they don’t have that, then you get tell them to pound sand.
This is a much better alternative for protecting a site than talking to lawyers when you don’t have the ability to rely upon section 230 as a defense for hosting user generated content.
I am for protecting the fediverse from over zealous copyright holders and copyright trolls with every legal tool available. That also comes with following the laws that exist and trying to mitigate any danger to the staff and users.
Lemmy.world is a large instance with a big target painted on it and probably many fewer lawyers than Reddit has on retainer. As such, removing piracy and copyright infringement from a site are reasonable steps to make sure that while DDOSs can take down the site, it will be harder for lawyers to do so.