"All VPN providers, except ProtonVPN, appeared in court to argue a defense. They raised various arguments, with the “no-log” defense from Surfshark and NordVPN standing out."
Why do individual European countries seem so obsessed with blocking Pirate sites? I assume the majority of IPs being pirated are likely from outside their own country, so the harm is negligible to the individual country's internal revenue streams, no?
To be fair, it is ridiculous to advocate that the solution to a broken system is circumventing the laws. Fix for the problems for copyright and intellectual property systems can't be "heroic" VPN companies.
Kim Dotcom become filthy rich by selling access to copyrighted materials and turned into folk hero of the alt-right. He was selling other peoples work per the kilobyte when kids were persecuted for copyright infringement, videos taken down for using a few second of music or a clip from another video . That is not a fair system.
This is democratic erosion and why United States founding documents are singular in their importance.
Such censorship is passed by elected legislators, interpreted by an independent judiciary, and subject to appeal (which NordVPN has already begun). From a procedural standpoint, that is democracy. But it ignores liberty, proportionality and limits on power.
Democratic erosion is how governments today expand surveillance, blocking and platform obligations while still technically obeying democratic rules
It’s not ancient history that the FCC threatened to take away ABCs broadcast license because Trump didn’t like what was said about Kirk or that public school teachers and college professors were fired over Kirk.
> Specifically, the VPNs argued that their “no-log” policy means they do not track user IP addresses or geolocate their users. Therefore, a court order to block access only for French users would violate their contractual obligations.
> For now, however, the targeted VPN providers have to find a way to implement the blocking order.
I'm curious about this point. What solution do they have if they want geolocalisation without giving up on privacy ?
Reminder to Americans with a strong sense of American exceptionalism (which is rather incredible given...{gestures broadly at everything happening in the US}): Sovereign states can apply whatever laws they want. They are not beholden to JD Vance, Elon Musk, or Donald "Conman" Trump. They do not care what Americans think about this.
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[ 0.24 ms ] story [ 35.3 ms ] threadCory Doctorow was talking about it recently. https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=OzjYwL16yLzQUwuY
"All VPN providers, except ProtonVPN, appeared in court to argue a defense. They raised various arguments, with the “no-log” defense from Surfshark and NordVPN standing out."
Kim Dotcom become filthy rich by selling access to copyrighted materials and turned into folk hero of the alt-right. He was selling other peoples work per the kilobyte when kids were persecuted for copyright infringement, videos taken down for using a few second of music or a clip from another video . That is not a fair system.
Such censorship is passed by elected legislators, interpreted by an independent judiciary, and subject to appeal (which NordVPN has already begun). From a procedural standpoint, that is democracy. But it ignores liberty, proportionality and limits on power.
Democratic erosion is how governments today expand surveillance, blocking and platform obligations while still technically obeying democratic rules
I'm curious about this point. What solution do they have if they want geolocalisation without giving up on privacy ?
VPNs have legitimate uses, if the precedence is set it opens the door to DHT blocking i.e. bootstrap nodes/adresses.