Western countries are becoming increasingly like China and Russia. UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand... So far, only the US still holds some resemblance to “protecting the freedom of speech” — sure, copyright violators are pursued, but at least nobody is trying to censor the Internet... yet.
> Western countries are becoming increasingly (...)
Authoritarian is the word, I believe. Thing is, along with that, there is this dangerous corporations embracing over own citizens. A weird and toxic relationship.
Although they do allow ISPs to censor it, and have been shown to employ massive surveillance methods. I wouldn't hold the US as the bastion of free speech on the internet.
Enforcement of copyright seems more like the opposite of China, to be honest. I don’t believe the US allows freedom of intellectual property either, the US government have been shutting down torrent sites for years.
On the other hand, large corporations (i.e. Elsevier) profiting from others' creation of intellectual property seems very inline with China's model in certain sectors...
Though I would agree that the comparison is weak. While I'm always against censorship in all its forms, relating it to China seems... stretched.
In the West, the surveillance is usually done by the private corporations instead of the government. Like Google, Facebook etc. For the end user there is no big difference.
I think NSA is major agent in surveillance. I am frankly more wary about governments and shady national security agencies doing surveillance on citizens than private companies doing it for commercial gains.
US doesn't need to block sites because many major IT companies are under their jurisdiction and they (their courts) can just order to remove the content or stop serving the domain name. For example, they seize casino's domain names and order the banks not to allow payment to them. What's wrong with online casinos? Should't people have the right to decide how to spend their money?
I am not saying that the US are perfect in every regard. I only admire their anti-censorship stance, which is increasingly rare. There are still many problems, e.g. with arbitrariness of law application, and the popularity of surveillance state.
However, there is subtle, but important (at least to me) distinction between “this site violates the law — let’s pursuit its owners legally” and “this site violates the law — let’s block it for everyone and censor communications to implement that”.
Upholding copyrights in court seems the basis of the rule of Law, and quite far from the situation in China and Russia.
Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible.
> the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
The difference is the ability of the government to pass arbitrary laws. There are (currently, in the West) two opposing views: natural law (laws are the refinement of what already is a natural part of human aspirations), and consensus law (law is what social consensus agrees upon). There’s also authoritarian law, but that is dictatorship.
Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship.
The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
The concept of Natural Law was an important part of enlightenment legal thinking. When the Declaration of Independence invokes the 'Laws of Nature', it's authors would certainly have been aware of and intentionally referencing contemporary thinking on the subject to justify the declaration.
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
As a Russian (and not a really fond of Putin's regime one) living in Germany, I can tell you that Russia's copyright policy is nowhere as strict as one of Germany. A lot of copyrighted content can be found on Russian websites, and what's missing from there is on Chinese ones.
You still need VPN if you want to get to some content forbidden for political reasons, but for most people the ability to get a movie/album/book they want matters more.
I already explained — there is a difference between legal pursuits and state-sponsored censorship. Also in Russia you basically need VPNs for everything — LinkedIn, Telegram etc.
Here in Switzerland, obtaining copyrighted content for own use is basically decriminalized (its illegal distribution, however, is not).
