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Comment by Dalewyn

8 months ago

There's also the nuance that while SOPA/PIPA were bills being legislated for potential passage, France is citing laws already in effect.

For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.

8 comments

Dalewyn

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AnthonyMouse  8 months ago

> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.

That does rather imply that the laws are worthless. Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.

Regardless of that, I would challenge your premise. You can violate an unjust law and risk the consequences. And if you get the PR right, there may not even be any consequences:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple%E2%80%93FBI_encryption_d...

But to your point, this is one of the reasons it's important to get these laws off the books and keep them off the books. Once you have the law, the government gets to choose the test case. You know perfectly well they'll be using it against dissidents and false positives tomorrow, but the test case is going to be some loathsome terrorists or a commercial piracy operation with no shades of grey, and then that's the case that sets the precedent.

They should never be allowed the opportunity.

  • dgoldstein0  8 months ago

    > Obviously there is going to be someone who doesn't do business in France and operates a public DNS server that doesn't censor anything.

    and so when the rights holders notice enough people pirating using dns resolvers they can't force to do anything via the french courts, they'll probably just take it up with the french ISPs and ask for IP blocks of these resolvers. And I'd guess they may already be trying to IP block various piracy sites.

    Will be interesting to see them play whack-a-mole. I wonder if at some point France will just start maintaining national blocklists, that if you want to run an ISP or reply to DNS queries from France, you are legally obligated to follow (or get blocked yourself); from the article, it sounds like the current law is significantly short of that so the whack-a-mole will continue.

    • immibis  8 months ago

      Italy has the system you're thinking of. It's called Piracy Shield. Upon receiving a blocking request from the government through the automated system developed for this purpose, all ISPs are required to block the domain or IP within 30 minutes or else their CEOs could be criminally charged and go to jail.

      2 replies →

hulitu  8 months ago

> For better or worse, if you do business in <x> you follow <x>'s laws or GTFO.

Except when <x> is ruled by <y>, in which case you impose a small fine as to not upset <y>.