This has happened once before and they reversed it. But they said this last time too:
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.
Oh oops, you haven’t pasted some cool copyleft licence below your words on this niche thread on a niche social media network so looks like I might remix and reuse your content without attribution… Unlucky
ZUCKERBERG HAS NO LEGAHL AUTHROITEE YO MY UPLOADS I RETAIN ALL OWNERSHIP FOR EVERYTHING.
I think you got the wrong person, the copyright guy is someone else.
I’ve seen a few people doing it, but I (and literally any companies scraping instances for content) just lol and move on.
I feel like I’ve only seen one, maybe two people doing it, but I guess there might’ve been more.
This is how the real world works