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Copyright Industry Continues Its Efforts To Ban VPNs
(www.techdirt.com)
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this post was submitted on 02 Apr 2026
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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?
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
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.
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.
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.
That's actually part of the motivation behind russian internet isolation, their head bitch leading the charge on it believes that the internet "violates the existence of borders in the world".
Or c) abolish copyright law entirely.