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.
thepiratebay.org is still up
they did go to prison tho
their apartment in Malmö looked and smelled like a triceratops hibernated in there, by the way
Ah yes, the pirate bay, the first stop for anyone wanting to download a file thats probably a virus.
Also they have lost lawsuits in the past and had fines levied against them and had property seized, so they arent as immune as you think.