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French Court Orders Popular VPNs to Block More Pirate Sites, Despite Opposition
- ironbound 10mo agoThey should ask Spain, how the court order blocked Cloudflare CDN at the ISP level.. badly
- izacus 10mo agoDo the people who asked for that block really think it went badly?
- junglistguy 10mo ago[dead]
- everyone 10mo agoOne of the benefits of the USA no longer being an ally is we should be able to ignore all this sort of bullshit in the EU now. Cory Doctorow was talking about it recently. https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=OzjYwL16yLzQUwuY https://youtu.be/3C1Gnxhfok0?si=OzjYwL16yLzQUwuY
- wooger 10mo agoEh? What has this got to do with the US? European based sports broadcast rights are an EU & UK issue entirely.
- ronsor 10mo agoThe truth is that the EU loves copyright and censorship just as much as the US does. The only difference is the branding and who pushes for it.
- quentindanjou 10mo agoIt is mostly US companies (Like Universal and Disney) pushing for copyright regulation in EU.
- mekoka 10mo agoIt's a simple narrative, one which increasingly looks like very convenient scapegoating as the cover is being blown with the ongoing divorce. It may be time to take a closer look at the other, more insidious, culprits. Europe has had its very own history of draconian business practices. Those empires haven't disappeared. Greed is greed everywhere.
- Eddy_Viscosity2 10mo agoThe EU is perfectly capable of doing its bullshit all by itself. See 'chat control'.
- y-curious 10mo agoYes now that the EU is divorcing the US you can now stream soccer illegally! Oh wait… you guys are doing ISP-level censorship on your own https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/spanish-soccer-league-battles-cloudflare-piracy-us-company-129010563 https://abcnews.go.com/amp/Business/wireStory/spanish-soccer...
- petcat 10mo agoThat article says that Cloudflare is fighting Spain about the censorship. ISP-level censorship is extremely rare in the US. Copyright and piracy is almost always handled by domain seizure ordered by a court, not ISP-level blocking (as is common in the EU).
- speed_spread 10mo agoFrance has its own self important cultural industry to pressure the government. And then sometimes the President himself is married to a pop star.
- shlip 10mo agoIn this specific case, it's not culture though, it's the sports diffusion rights mafia (LFP, beIN, Canal+).
- LexiMax 10mo ago[flagged]
- zxcvasd 10mo agovpn, piracy sites, government-level blocking, etc. is all pretty damn on-topic for hacker news. the "wrong" types of political content, for this site, are the ones that have nothing to do with technology of any kind, and spark no curiosity otherwise.
- everdrive 10mo agoPretty ominous line here for ProtonVPN users: "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."
- 0x3f 10mo agoWhat's ominous about it?
- petcat 10mo agoProton is relocating their servers out of Switzerland and into Germany over privacy concerns. They are now facing the possibility of the same privacy concerns in EU countries. Ironically, the safest place to host a private VPN service may actually be USA given the way privacy-related things in the EU are going.
- 0x3f 10mo agoThe EU member states are still sovereign, though. This French court ruling doesn't really affect the prospects of certain kinds of privacy in Germany. I think the parent might have been referring to the fact they didn't raise a no-log argument, thus implying they do log. But I don't think that makes much sense either.
- squigz 10mo ago> Ironically, the safest place to host a private VPN service may actually be USA given the way privacy-related things in the EU are going. Why, because American companies are never forced to do things because of copyright and/or law enforcement?
- jacquesm 10mo agoThe main reason for Protonmail's existence is that they are not hosted in the USA.
- CommanderData 10mo agoSwitzerland has lax laws on piracy for personal use so I'm quite surprised by this.
- logicalfails 10mo agoWhy 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?
- alephnerd 10mo agoMedia & Entertainment Services are overrepresented in a number of European countries like Italy, Spain, and France. Tier 1 Football/Soccer is a massive revenue generator, and one of the most pirated products globally. > I assume the majority of IPs being pirated are likely from outside their own country Ever heard of Ligue 1, home to teams like PSG, Olympique de Marseille, Olympique Lyonnais, and AS Monaco, and superstars like Mbappe, Dembélé, and Hakimi? French viewers also watch Spanish, Italian, Belgian, German, and English football/soccer as well.
- JanisErdmanis 10mo agoPiracy does not pay taxes ;)
- 3D30497420 10mo agoOr make "campaign contributions".
- general1465 10mo agoIn Czech Republic you are automatically assumed to be a pirate and thus paying fee from size of empty memory device (USB, SD, HDD, ..) by GB. So lot of people will justify piracy by "I have already paid for it".
- alephnerd 10mo agoCzechia also doesn't have a major entertainment revenue the same way France does. Ligue 1 generates around $3B a year in revenue, while Chance Liga is in the $10M-50M, and most Czech language media remains owned and distributed by state-owned CT, so rights have already been paid. And private sector CME/Nova (formerly owned by Ronald Lauder of "let's invade Greenland" fame and now owned by Petr Kellner's family) and Prima (owned by oligarch Ivan Zach) are used by their owners as political tools.
- mrtksn 10mo agoTo 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.
- buellerbueller 10mo ago>To be fair, it is ridiculous to advocate that the solution to a broken system is circumventing the laws. The American Revolution would like a word.
- marcosdumay 10mo agoThe US independence wasn't a bunch of people circumventing laws.
- buellerbueller 10mo agoBritain would disagree.
- marcosdumay 10mo agoStanding up and saying you will not follow a law isn't circumventing it.
- buellerbueller 10mo agoThrowing a revolution and creating a new country with its own legal framework, however, is. In fact, it is probably the ne plus ultra of law circumvention.
- zxcvasd 10mo ago
- CGMthrowaway 10mo agoThis 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
- nathan_compton 10mo agoI think this is a misunderstanding: > This is democratic erosion and why United States founding documents are singular in their importance. Founding documents don't do shit. What one needs is a culture which is perpetually hostile towards power. All problems of power are social problems. No law, founding document, principle is going to prevent people from doing stuff if they want to do it.
- pixelready 10mo agoYeah, for France just compare reactions to these measures to the marching in the streets and general striking behavior you get from austerity measures, and the subsequent backpedaling by authorities. I can only conclude the average person there either just isn’t aware of this, doesn’t understand the implications, or doesn’t value these sorts of digital access erosions in the same way.
- observationist 10mo agoYou also need the formal mechanisms by which rule of law is upheld, protected against mob rule, and has a feedback loop in which course correction is possible. A culture hostile to power isn't stable without stable principles and a leviathan by which those principles persist, which is the whole point of the American experiment. The founding documents laid out a system intended to address the problems of the era, persist into the future, and adapt to the needs of each generation while protecting and maximizing the liberty of each individual. If all you've got is uniform hostility to power, you've lost the plot and won't ever get past small scale tribalism.
- LightBug1 10mo agoArrrrrrrrrr, me hearties ... we be needin VPNs fer our VPNs!
- drnick1 10mo agoIsn't ISP-level blocking of the kind seen in Europe trivially bypassable by using a non-ISP DNS server such as 9.9.9.9 or 1.1.1.1?
- Aachen 10mo agohttps://tweakers.net/nieuws/243456/italie-geeft-cloudflare-boete-omdat-sites-op-1111-dns-niet-worden-geblokkeerd.html https://tweakers.net/nieuws/243456/italie-geeft-cloudflare-b... "boete" means "fine". With that, I think there's enough loan/brand words that the article lede is readable to any English speaker. Basically, cloudflare has in Italy gotten a 14 million euro fine because it refused to implement blocks for its public dns service 1.1.1.1 Anyway, dns blocks are silly. So long as it's in the dns system proper, you can trivially run a local resolver. Focusing on this now is just a distraction until IP blocks come along and you actually can't reach blocked parts of the internet if the target service doesn't support an overlay network
- wmf 10mo agoThey're not just doing DNS blocking. Spain is doing IP blocking and other countries will follow.
- shlip 10mo ago> 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 ?
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- wmf 10mo agoZero knowledge cryptography could work here. You can prove you're over 18 without revealing your age or prove you're in France without revealing anything else. VPN providers might not be skilled enough to implement it though.
- llm_nerd 10mo agoReminder 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.
- gpderetta 10mo agoYeah! It is not like America is going to come to arrest their leaders!
- CommanderData 10mo agoHow long until we see orders to block torrents, decentralised tech like IPFS? VPNs have legitimate uses, if the precedence is set it opens the door to DHT blocking i.e. bootstrap nodes/adresses.
- storus 10mo agoWill they ban Tor as well? You can visit those sites with Tor easily anyway.
- xyzal 10mo agoPirate sites? It would do more good if they blocked X instead.
- bdauvergne 10mo agoIt is all about football matches on IPTV; it has nothing to do with torrent or free speech.
- musicale 10mo agoFrench Court Orders Popular Winemakers to Remove Alcohol, Despite Opposition