“copyright industry continues efforts to remove locks from homes so they can come in and inspect your media for piracy any time they want”
If they succeed in banning vpn, then millions of people won’t be able to do their jobs. Because tons of companies use it.
They’ll carve out a business exception. Only licensed users will be allowed to use VPNs. Everyone else is a second class citizen.
Which won’t be broadly enforceable, but it’ll fuck with people enough.
All you have to do is configure the gateway and client to use port 443.
Without a defense, the court reportedly concluded that both NordVPN and ProtonVPN actively advertise their ability to bypass geo-restrictions, citing match schedules in their marketing materials. The VPNs are therefore seen as active participants in the piracy chain rather than passive conduits, according to local media reports.
How is bypassing georestrictions piracy?
Also good luck actually banning VPNs. China tried that and many people there still use them.
Fuck copyright law in general. It has done damage to humanity as a whole while making a wealthy few even richer.
Any system whereby a thousand middlemen don’t get to get a cut of the money is illegal and immoral. /s
Won’t anyone think of the poor shareholders?
This gets repeated a lot - but for avoidance of doubt, practically no normal people use VPNs in China, and the government is very successful at blocking them.
You can set up a brand new, never seen before VPN on entirely new IPs and random ports today, and at 1am tomorrow it’ll be blocked. Commercial VPNs are basically unusable. (For a while, Cloudflare Warp was a very nice way around - but they put a stop to that too.)
IF you have a competent government willing to put the work in, blocking VPNs is entitely doable. That “if” is probably our best hope in the west, though.
Stallman is proven right more and more everyday
He’s been right about damn near everything software related since the 80s.
https://tech.yahoo.com/computing/articles/debian-edition-doesnt-linux-172134222.html
The Debian project has just released a new snapshot of its alternative operating system, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025, which now includes a working 64-bit edition. This is a massive update for a project that many people forget exists, but you need to know right away that this is not a Linux distribution.
This latest release is based on Debian Trixie, or more specifically, the testing branch known as Sid. The Hurd is the original kernel that the GNU project was developing before Linus Torvalds announced his “hobby” project back in 1991.
I don’t think that Linux is going anywhere, but Hurd does march on!
Russia has banned them, sort of.
Although I don’t think their methods would work here, or rather, I don’t think they could grab the kind of power necessary.
Russia now has regional internet blackouts, were they effectively only allow a small number of white listed sites to be accessible.
So if you you literally cannot reach the VPN servers because only a handful of Russian government websites, preferred businesses, and UK banks (oligarchs gotta oligarch) are whitelisted, well then you banned VPNs, again, sort of.
They did roll out a government approved VPN for specific approved individuals and use cases, to a get around those blackouts…so that’s something.
Whitelists are the death of the Internet if they are implemented. We already have a massive issue with corporate centralization of the Internet, and if free and open competition isn’t allowed to exist in the first place, then why even have an Internet?
It also helps the government keep ultimate control over their populace, which I’m sure is what they want at the end of the day like any regime throughout history.
Licences for media are country specific. So vpns allow you to circumvent that. I don’t beleive it’s piracy. But it’s…something.
That made sense at a time when media was physical and could be stopped at the border. There are no border posts in the internet.
So now we could either a) make the copyright industry draw up new licenses that make sense for the internet, or b) make everyone else spend billions to create and suffer border posts in the internet.
Yeah it’s outdated. But should the worldwide license cost the same as the licence just for lithuania? What if you were a small upstart just trying to do something online for your local community? Or a school hosting licenced media for study purposes.
While you are right there are theoretically no borders on the internet. They can be built, Netflix US or Netflix AUS for instance are geo blocking so they can pay smaller licences. And that is their right just as much as it is for a school which is fenced with a .edu login. At least in copyright laws current iteration. Who should be responsible for an outside actor getting access?
Fun to think about.
Or c) abolish copyright law entirely.
So if I buy a physical game in the US, that is me buying a licence to play the game (as it has already been made clear legally that I do not own the game through means of DRM). If I then move to a different country and take that game with me without repurchasing it in another country, is that piracy?
Na coz you own the media outright. But streaming a show from a country on Netflix that you are not in, is against the licences terms. I don’t think you would be liable. Its more a Netflix problem providing media to someone who theyre not licenced to share it with.
Edit: I’m thinking offline physical copys not online serviced games.
Yes. And airlines are active participants in the piracy chain. I mean, they openly advertise their services with the ability to switch the country you’re in! BAN THEM!
It is good for my awareness to read the news about my country from another country. Or read the local news of some event at the (some obscure) local website from another country, instead of a summarized and perhaps skewed global news article of that same country.
