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!
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.
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.
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".
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!