Truth.

According to Torrentfreak.com, “this week the controversial French three-strikes anti-piracy law Hadopi went live. Copyright holders are currently in the process of sending out tens of thousands of IP-addresses of alleged infringers to Internet service providers, and this will increase to over a million in a few weeks. The ISPs have to hand over the identities of the associated accounts to the authorities within a week, or face a fine of 1500 euros per unidentified IP-address.” Does that sound like the French govt is trying to police the French internet? It is.

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Some say things like this are nothing to be afraid of “if you haven’t done anything wrong,” but that probably means they never heard Niemöller‘s famous quotation, “first they came… .” You can find the original poem by clicking his name, but this particular alteration fits this case the best:

First they came for the hackers.
But I never did anything illegal with my computer,
so I didn’t speak up.

Then they came for the pornographers.
But I thought there was too much smut on the Internet anyway,
so I didn’t speak up

Then they came for the anonymous remailers.
But a lot of nasty stuff gets sent from anon.penet.fi,
so I didn’t speak up.

Then they came for the encryption users.
But I could never figure out how to work PGP anyway,
so I didn’t speak up.

Then they came for me.

And by that time there was no one left to speak up.

I hope the French people won’t stand for this shit, because that would encourage the media industry and the anti-piracy groups to go even further, in even more countries. And if that was to happen, everyone would lose.



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