33
votes
Proposed amendments to Denmark's laws on copyright and broadcasting would see VPNs limited for common uses under changes to combat access to illegal streaming services
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- Title
- Denmark takes a Viking swing at VPN-enabled piracy
- Published
- Dec 15 2025
- Word count
- 776 words
If people keep using VPNs to bypass bullshit laws then maybe you should repeal the bullshit laws.
Bullshit laws like fighting the scourge of human trafficking, organized crime, child exploitation and (digital) abuse, theft of state secrets, sabotage of government and company platforms, destabilization/manipulation of countries' public discourse, tax evasion, fraud and so on?
I understand that on a surface level, some people's knee-jerk reaction is that being able to track people online is bad.
(I want to acknowledge separately, the loosely connected, yet extremely serious issue of kids and teens being ruined by predatory algorithms. Being able to lock people out of legal online services is a legitimate need for a well-regulated modern society in the tik-tok age.)
I work in networking. A large part of my job consists of fixing all the innumerable events that occur that would be impossible to stop without being able to identify people online is strictly necessary for society to function.
The internet needs to be regulated. This means identifying people. The government knowing what you do online is not an issue for most people.
VPNs are your enemy. The free ones are connected to a bunch of unwanted events, giving your information to other countries who can then use said information for a host of nefarious things (directed at countries and companies, not individuals).
Paid VPNs are points of failure that can get all your information leaked. It's much, much better to trust your internet service providers as they are actually properly regulated to ensure that your data is responsibly protected in accordance with local laws and global standards.
It amazes me that tech-savvy areas online want to go back to internet with perceived anonymity. It's like those people have completely forgotten all the literal murders, child sex rings etc. that enabled.
I expect this is the worst intersection of technology-related professions and groups and insane libertarianism.
Wanting internet anonymity is an extreme view that has dire complications for society at large. Yes, Chat control and other laws aren't perfect, what first-pass regulation of completely new parts of society are? We're in desperate need for regulating the internet sensibly. We have to start somewhere and refine laws as the regulatory area matures.
In some ways I sympathise with where you're coming from, but I just can't agree with the conclusions.
When communication was postal, and later when it was done by phone, there were strict laws governing privacy and surveillance with warrant requirements as well as practical, physical limitations on how much could be monitored. I vehemently disagree that we should just shrug and accept pervasive monitoring as the default when the right to privacy has been accepted and enshrined for decades prior, and exceptions to that right have previously required specific, targeted measures with probable cause and legal oversight.
Data security in most businesses is absolutely laughable. Discord publicly leaked thousands of age verification documents just a couple of months ago, and they're generally one of the more technically competent ones. There are indeed a whole lot of sketchy VPNs out there that I wouldn't trust further than I can throw them, but I would trust an audited organisation like Mullvad, whose whole business is privacy, vastly more than a semi-competent, semi-monopoly ISP who has absolutely no interest in privacy and security beyond the regulatory bare minimum.
I think you're underselling how absolutely enormous the technical holes in the chat control proposals are - they would open up serious security risks to the average person, which could and would be exploited by exactly the kind of bad actors you're concerned about, while simultaneously doing nothing to prevent actual encrypted communication because you can't legislate away mathematical principles.
I can understand the broad underlying concerns that lead to these kind of proposals, but they aren't just a bit rough around the edges, they would actively make things substantially worse. And I'm deeply skeptical of legislators who keep pushing them even after being warned of that.
[Edit] As @DeaconBlue very rightly says, that's also all at least something of a side note on this one: the legislators are explicitly saying it's related to copyright infringement, not related to serious crime.
We do not live in a pre-internet society. The world is connected in ways impossible by phone or letter. This also means that serious criminal activity is organized in other, much more powerful, encrypted, instantaneous ways.
Computers and automatic programs can perform these criminal attempts billions of times an hour, virtually knocking on the doors of hundreds of thousands of houses and businesses and their internals as accessible by the internet.
That is reality. We need to have laws that deal with the possibilities of today.
If anyone can provide a practically enforceable way of not giving serious criminals free reign online without reasonably regulated mass surveillance, they'll win every prize and award available to humankind.
There is no such solution today. There is no practical way of having a right to online privacy. It cannot exist without letting criminals and literal rogue countries systematically trying empty banks of their deposits electronically do and run whatever they like.
This is the age we live in. I can't envision " specific, targeted measures with probable cause and legal oversight" that can handle today's situation. This is an analogy to appeals to past principles unless someone out there has figured out how it'd work in practice.
Are we talking a Stasi-like manual information gathering state that'd be trivial to circumvent with a burner phone? I don't even know where to start envisioning what law enforcement without digital access to content.
I'm regularly in court to witness regarding to digital evidence. Serious crimes. Insurance claims worth astronomical sums as one can't even find the perpetrators to hold them accountable.
In relation to Chat Control, DSA, Data act, the ePrivacy Directive, NIS2 Directive, CRA, eIDAS, Cybersecurity act, DORA, PLD, EMFA, Mica and so on:
The EU is trying. The legislators are attempting to legislate. They need to start somewhere. Jurisprudence is a process that takes time. Many critics just say no, rather than suggesting alternatives way of sensible regulation.
I'd happily, happily live in a digital Europe than any other place on Earth. Yes, the EU is at least a couple decades behind, but other countries are way, way worse.
(See my other previous comment in relation to why piracy and illegally accessing content, the use of VPNs is directly linked to serious, serious crime.)
I do understand the need for change as technology develops, but to me the baseline assumption of privacy is an important one - I'm not necessarily saying we can't deviate from that assumption, but I do think privacy should be the default and any deviation from it should be treated as a high-risk aberration even if it's ultimately deemed necessary. I was actually saying just the other day that I can cautiously see some positives in Australia's recent social media restrictions, for example.
Maybe you and I would even settle on similar conclusions about security legislation in the end if we really hammered out the possibilities, I genuinely don't know, but it's important to me that the process of getting there respects privacy as the deeply important right that those previous laws treated it as, even if the necessities of modern technology mean that it can't be protected in precisely the same way. If legislation steps on people's privacy, I want it treated as if it's radioactive - not bad, per se, but dangerous, risky, and deserving of respect, to be used only when absolutely necessary and within strict limits.
And yeah, the EU absolutely has created some of the better digital legislation out there over the years - GDPR is solid, and I certainly appreciate having at least one government with meaningful leverage willing to stand up to big tech companies, that's for sure - but I do firmly believe that many of the anti-encryption proposals we're seeing at the moment are far worse than just an imperfect starting point. I consider them actively dangerous from a technical perspective, not just in the "risks outweigh the rewards" sense, but in the "will literally worsen the problems they claim to fix, so there is no reward, plus a bunch of additional risks" sense.
...i'd rather live in a world governed by freedom than by fear...
I want everyone who reads this sentence to note:
This is how authoritarians operate. They take an otherwise perfectly normal and benign desire, then use an endless barrage of rhetoric to twist the perception of that desire into an "extreme view".
Do not be fooled by these creepy arguments that the government must be able to track you online in order to combat <insert bad guys here>. It isn't true. It might make the jobs of investigators more difficult if <bad guys> are able to use technology like VPNs, but the liberties and right to privacy and anonymity of society as a whole should not be sacrificed at the alter of making investigators' jobs easier. It isn't worth it. The potential downsides for society are immeasurable.
"The government must know what you do online" is an insane thing to believe in. It's authoritarian, it's creepy, and it is not in the interest of the average person.
What's your workable alternative?
How, specifically, is law enforcement supposed to "work through" technology like VPNs?
If anyone has a solution or an idea towards a solution, if you can link to someone else who has one, please share!
No-one ever does. An appeal to an unworkable principle is not an argument.
I want everyone who read this sentence to note:
In the face of evidence of how crime works today, this is an extreme libertarian view.
People who argue like this can never, ever show a workable alternative where we can have a functioning society with reasonably empowered law enforcement that can actually do their job and hold people accountable for serious crime.
They'll vaguely try to twist the perception that surely we'll somehow manage to have investigators who can take the bad guys when anyone with a device that can connect to the internet can plan crimes with absolute impunity.
How? What methods are these cops supposed to use?
If they have no workable alternative, their views can be dismissed offhand. Their worldview is based on something they cannot articulate arguments for that can work in practice.
Now, let's provide just one example to the contrary, showing how criminal gangs have used encrypted devices to get away with serious, serious crimes.
Let's talk about when the FBI ran Anom, an encrypted phone company with modified Blackberries from 2018 through 2021.
Here's a wikipedia link about Operation Trojan Shield
I strongly, strongly recommend the book Dark Wire: The Incredible True Story of the Largest Sting Operation Ever about the operation.
The book and the sting operation intercepted millions of actual messages between criminals using their encrypted phones to create the perfect crimes that could in no other way be identified. The lack of sophistication is extreme: the communication app literally seemed like a Get-out-of-jail-free card.
A complete fluke led to the operation. Over 1100 arrests worldwide. 1100 members of different transnational criminal organizations (TCOs)! Operating with impunity smugling drugs (more than 40 tons found), cash (more than $50 million taken, guns, vehicles, and so on.
That's just one such app. There's Ennetcom and EncroChat (over 60.000 subscribers) to name just a couple more.
TCO crime is a large issue in Western, well-regulated countries with low corruption. Imagine how destabilizing it is in other countries. Now, those arguing on principle regarding privacy, must make their solutions work also in these jurisdictions. They can't even provide solutions that'll work in the most developed, easiest to regulate, small, highest trust societies in the world: The Nordic countries.
Now do they really, really even want us to believe they're arguing in good faith that they have global, unspecified solutions they can't ever display?
It's an insane thing to say "well, privacy would be nice and anonymity is a right, trust me that some other folks can make it work because it makes me feel creeped out".
No, for the average person, it's hugely, hugely in their interest that organized, career criminal networks have to be monitored. That in turn requires routine and responsible monitoring of digital content at large. If there's an alternative, why is that alternative so secret, vague or never even presented?
At face value, this can sound icky. Always ask those against this: "How's your world workable? What specific alternative solution do they have? How many deaths and how much crime is your feeling of "creepy" worth?"
I actually think you've given a great example there of how this can work out without pervasive surveillance on everybody! The FBI successfully targeted and infiltrated devices being used by criminals, and monitored those suspects using compromised endpoint applications, rather than rolling out population-wide monitoring or attempting to prevent encrypted communication from happening.
Flipping the "how's it workable" logic on its head, I also haven't seen a viable suggestion for how criminals can be prevented from using strong encryption. It's well known technology, and can even be derived from first principles by a sufficiently capable mathematician - it's not possible to keep it out of determined hands. It seems like legislating it will by definition only lead to law abiding people being monitored, but if you've seen a workable option I'd be interested?
Through sheer luck and the cooperation of one person, international police got 1100 serious criminals using a simple, industrial scale communication service.
How's that not the perfect example for why we can't have to resort to random dumb luck to catch these huge networks? What of all the other apps and platforms were this random dumb luck doesn't happen?
Who even knows if that one event is an extreme data point, or there are many such operating networks right now?
I want to reiterate: There's still no workable solution in this thread to mass surveillance of digital communication. That's not something to forget. I also want to remind everyone that all these law enforcement agencies all over the world, serious human rights organizations, all sorts of groups we should listen to are saying it's the only way.
On the other side we have, well the folks arguing on the principle of anonymity and privacy who have no solutions and no alternatives. That's still the situation we're in.
Now to the question:
Circumstantial evidence is real evidence used to prove crimes have taken place without reasonable doubt, where other explanations objectively cannot be true and the credibility of actors is put under so much question a reasonable court can exclude those supposed pieces of evidence.
Encrypted communication without content but with metadata is more than enough to link criminals together, when and where they've communicated with whom. That's a necessary start for all sorts of warrants and other investigation steps.
VPNs and other systems to obfuscate where digital trails are made, disallowing device fingerprinting etc. seriously limits what data is used and can be used. Sometimes crimes aren't discovered until much later. Being allowed to store metadata has serious use, even though that encroaches on privacy.
The sheer volume of digital footprints we leave are what together is the evidence presented in court. We're talking fluctuations in power usage with digital power meters that identify when there is or isn't activity (say someone says they're cooking dinner using an electric stove, but no activity).
Even with encryption, requests need to be made to share the data to the end user at some point with whoever's showing them content. Those services/companies can be compelled to store this infomration.
I'm sure we've all heard of the "how to dispose of a corpse" google searches and so on. I've been in court where the damning piece of evidence was a cell phone tower ping that triangulated that a phone was at a specific location at a specific point in time, almost touching another phone right at the time that the owner of one phone was being murdered. The husband got sentenced for murder. The digital pieces created an undeniable puzzle.
The connection of data points is the value. However, that's also where the big brother-esque stuff comes in. Therefore healthy regulation is paramount. Individual privacy rights and community needs for security (the most basic function of a society) need to be balanced. There's no reasonable balance where the security aspect is almost entirely disregarded for the matter of privacy.
Society at its core is based on trust. We need to elect politicians that create a state we can trust. How much trust is enough that politicians or public workers don't abuse data too much (whatever that is). We have to have an expectation of trust in government. Otherwise we're in a failed state where it's imperative of me as a citizen to do my part in trying to rectify the core failures of the state so we can deal with lesser issues in time.
The ideal amount of crime is not 0. It sounds insane, but being able to break laws is utterly critical to advancing society.
Without the ability to commit crimes, you are unable to fight a system that makes dissidence illegal.
Yeah, this. "Crime-free" is assuming a perfect society that isn't entrenched in centuries or millenia of culture. Imagine the Civil Rights movement in the digital era.
And Remember, Gay marriage wasn't legal in the US as recently as 15 years ago.
Very dramatic examples and I don't want to compare those to actual hate and harm being done. But the main point here is that government surveillance can and will be used against the things it's supposedly protecting if left unchecked. At the very least don't preemptively comply with it.
No-one is arguing the straw-man of wanting a crime-free society.
I can't see anyone in this thread arguing to throw all of society's good values and systems out the window.
If you're getting at civil disobedience, the whole idea of getting laws changed based on breaking them responsibly hinges on people willing to accept the consequences of being punished for breaking an immoral law. That's the whole idea where civil disobedience is meant as a tool for changing the system.
If we think people are participating in good faith in this thread, that is.
As an aside, I also don't see anyone in this thread who're against enforcing laws presenting an argument for why it's healthy for society to have unenforced or unenforceable laws.
Why do we think those who fight crime for a living feel they need more tools? Are these law enforcement folks, politicians, organizations just lazy? Could it be that those who work on these issues every day just can't find alternatives? Unless we're lazily vilifying them, why do we think all these people believe, in good faith, that their solutions are the least bad solutions? Is everyone just stupid or evil?
Or maybe the simplest explanation is that all these experts genuinely believe they're trying to better the world.
Who are these serious human rights organisations, who are these "other groups" who are saying that mass surveillance of digital communication is the only way to prevent crimes? Because I can think of a few who would say that the ability to hide your digital footprint is a paramount civil right.
Sure, make it a crime for an elected politician to chat with lobbyists, fellow politicians, clerks outside of real-time public record, THEN we can talk. Full real-time stream of cabinet meetings, for starters.
No? National Security? Yeah, as usual. Transparency for Thee, not for Me.
Swabbing toilets inside EU parliament and my local parliament proved presence of cocaine. Nothing was done. Those laws you want to enforce so eagerly are not fair, they are to keep some people restricted while others enjoy their freedoms, including snorting coke during parliamentary sessions.
In any case, if police wants to find out who sells illegally imported weapons, they can... go and buy some? They have the ability to issue themselves fake ids, create fake paper trail, print money and so on.
I am way more concerned about structural corruption than about smuggling. The kind where Microsoft writes curriculum on digital education for my whole country. The one where chair of association of software vendors writes calls for public tender for software for multiple ministries. Legally. Also sits in the parliament. Probably snorts the coke, too.
I forget exactly where I picked up this truism, but it's a good one:
The laws are completely different for the rich and famous. At a certain point, wealth means you are allowed to do illegal drugs and brag about it. Molest kids without repurcussion. So on and so forth. Your punishments no longer are relevant to the scale your crimes, unless you are caught by the plebs.
A corner pirate peddling illegal DVDs does a rounding error of a fraction of a penny damage to the local economy, while bankers that ahnillate the world economy periodically get bonuses.
Not OP, but I think the police should continue to use their current set of tools. These tools are worse than if they unfettered ability to track users on the internet, and it means many people will be murdered, children raped, yadayada, with no recourse.
Is what it is, though. I’d take the crimes over the surveillance.
Anybody claiming that piracy is funding terrorists and traffiking has fallen for a bald-faced lie. Those actors can make about 10000x more money more easily by smuggling some drugs or providing slaves.
The CIA probably provides more money to terrorists than all pirate activity combined.
The priority here is to stop people from watching people watch media content that is not licensed in Denmark. It's not
The bullshit laws for this particular bill are "A spreadsheet says it's not worth the effort to make this cartoon available to me legally so I am going to pirate it"
We do need to regulate the internet sensibly, you're right. This kind of bill isn't it.
I've read the draft law. I speak Danish. I know the context the law comes in, both politically and in terms of today's regulatory situation. This new law goes way beyond VPNs.
This law actually and substantially criminalizes gaining access to any content-service where access is limited by "technical solutions or systems" (indholdet fra enhver anden indholdstjeneste, hvor adgangen er begrænset af tekniske foranstaltninger eller ordninger) .
For example this criminalizes access to "illegal web pages" at large to access content one has no legal right to access as it's not freely available. ("omgå blokering af ulovlige hjemmesider")
There are a number of sensible changes relating to intellectual property directly too:
The primary aim of the law is making the regulation platform neutral, to account for future technologies. That's the goal. VPNs are listed as an example.
The law will demand that disputes don't go to court (As the big companies want), but to Ophavsretslicensnævnet (a civil dispute board) to resolve issues regarding whether or not terms and conditions in license agreements are "reasonable" and therefore legal. Also what appropriate economic compensation is. This board can unilaterally change the terms and conditions when they are unreasonable (a consumer benefit) that the company must then challenge in court. Then it's not me as a private person vs. giant corporation, but government vs. giant corporation in court.
Online piracy is rightly presented as a threat to all content producers, including news. These are essential for a country. Especially one with a small a population (and language group) as Denmark. This is a legitimate threat to democracy, functioning public discourse and so on.
Piracy in small countries can hinder investment in the arts and all content creation. Those who follow the law end up paying for all the pirate passengers, which is unreasonable to them. Unenforced laws are not something society benefits from.
These piracy conglomerates are often run by organized crime or rouge states (like North Korea). They funnel money to other criminality, abuse/violence and online services for criminal activities.
These sites are grossly over-represented in tampering with users' hardware and information.
We know this. Law enforcement knows this. It's time the law acknowledges this. Every other country should do the same.
As someone who frequently consumes foreign media and has many times had to grapple with licensing issues, it's difficult to see this as anything but far too heavy-handed. With such draconion regulation, there's so much media that will simply forever be inaccessible because it'll never get licensed because the powers that be have decided that it's too niche or won't be profitable or sometimes even something as stupid and trivial as the licensor having an axe to grind with a particular genre or studio.
And that doesn't even get into things like overbearing localizers eliminating the choice to watch the original audio with subtitles, giving no option except the localized dubbed version.
There needs to be serious reform around all of this before banning VPNs for streaming access can become even a shadow of a consideration.
I've tried to understand where this sentiment comes from: Why do I have a right to force people to provide their services to me?
One of the most important rights in intellectual property is the right not to be compelled to have my "moral rights as the creator" of a work be impinged.
That's why Trump can't just use music at his rallies when the artists don't want. That's why I don't have to make my entertainment accessible in North Korea keeping the circus part of the proverbial bread and circus well stocked.
I can choose (and do choose) not to provide my services be used to support genocide, authoritarian regimes and so on.
Why is it that there's some form of right to have foreign companies license their content so I get to use/consume it?
If I only want to provide my content dubbed, or forced with Ancient Egyptian subtitles or whatever else I choose, that's my right as the one who owns the IP.
Yes, licensing should have global standards. Maybe the UN could actually be of some use, but I don't see that happening. A ton of standardization and international regulation would greatly benefit humanity, progress and all these big words.
However, the lack thereof doesn't mean I should be forced to have my work abused or replicated in ways where I don't get the compensation I'm owed for creating my work.
The thing is, local licensors have absolutely nothing to do with creators. They're just distributors, and in today's connected world, increasingly legally mandated middlemen. If you ask creators what they'd prefer, they'll almost always say they'd like to see their works distributed globally, but that often doesn't happen because the entities in charge are publishers from the creator's home country and local licensors, both of which are corporate and interested solely in what will generate maximum revenue… the creator's wishes are barely a footnote in most cases.
We see this repeatedly when creators use the power of the internet to cut out the middlemen and take distribution into their own hands. There are rarely if ever geographical restrictions on who can buy their music or comics or whatever. Nearly always, barring countries with draconian culture control, media not being available in particular regions boils down to needlessly convoluted distribution systems that are designed first and foremost for extracting value from the work of others failing creators and consumers alike.
All the power to the creators who choose to spend time distributing for themselves!
Comics, music, sound, books, paintings, drawings, arts and crafts are easy works to create where distribution/promotion is often what lets a creator live making their creations.
For those who can make enough and show their works to the world: awesome!
For movies, tv series, video games, complicated software, medicine, inventions etc there are often scores, hundreds of thousands of collaborators who create and maintain together.
For practical purposes, they pretty much require distributors/rights managers/employers and collective IP rights management to be able to sell their creations and distribute income to themselves in ways they've agreed on.
Just like companies often need specialized legal expertise for every jurisdiction they want to sell their product/services in, you need people to navigate scores of IP regulations, systems, requirements and ways of getting paid, often from national copyright management organizations.
For these groups of creators behind individual works, IP rights systems are designed not to extract value, but to enable mass groups to create together. Otherwise these projects wouldn't ever work. For example, a lot of crowdfunding failures show this in practice. Management and companization are powerful technologies that enable innovations, deep individual specialization for individuals, and enable creations that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
I don't agree with this at all. There's more examples than can be counted, many famous in popular culture, of media companies worldwide leveraging the labyrinthine systems (which they themselves are largely responsible for building) to enable extraction to such extreme degrees that the industry as a whole is frequently seen as predatory.
There is value in companies like studios and publishers organizing massive productions, but licensing is complicated precisely because they made it complicated. It could be much more simple, but they'll never streamline if left to their own devices because a simpler licensing landscape would obviate them in many cases.
I'm sure we agree that it'd be great with a better system aligning much more closely to our values and so much more goes to those who create rather than moochers and other intermediary steps.
It'd be great with global standards for reporting income, for bank clearinghouses, copyright, the same electrical plugs to fit every socket, so food prices reflect production and transportation costs, not all the other intermediaries, the world would be much greater with standards in all sorts of areas.
We've got what we've got due to the complexity of history. I don't care who's most at fault, the companies, the failures of politicians, of voters, of greedy nationalists, over-idealistic anarchists, how insanely unreasonable the lengths of copyright are in many cases, whoever or whatever we blame for each bit.
The cause of the problem doesn't change that the problem is real and exists today.
The reality is that we live in a world where you and I cannot meaningfully manage to sell our works globally without distributors to navigate for us. The systems we have today enable creation. A world without IP rights cannot function without us consumers losing out tremendously.
I don't like it, but that's how it is and I have to deal with that.
We'll just have to agree to disagree, then. I see this all as an indictment of how severely our systems are broken and a call to arms to fix those systems.
I also just generally find it unconscionable that not the government (which would be bad enough) but random private entities can decide what I can and cannot consume and that I'm just supposed to pretend that these shows, movies, music, etc I see people online talking about but aren't licensed locally don't exist. The idea is more absurd than I can properly express.
But don't you dare strum the same four chords, or it's in the court for you. Copyright is just bullshit broken. I don't wanna purloin it, but let me damn pay for it, or what was it even released for?
I think there’s valid grounds for some level of copyright protection, because it truly is a boon to smaller creators when used correctly. It’s clearly gone overboard, though.
And yes, that’s the funny thing about using VPNs to access foreign streaming services: it’s not piracy in the classical sense, because the viewer is going out of their way to pay to view the media because no licensor in their region has seen it fit to make that media available. They’re trying to do the right thing! Really, it’s in a completely different category from actual piracy like sketchy streaming sites and torrents.
You've made this point that, basically, piracy funds actual crimes.
I'm not trying to pick a fight, I just want to understand the pipeline here. I go to a rom site that is essentially links to torrents. I download, I don't fucking know, Tears of the Kingdom through BitTorrent with my VPN on for extra safety.
How is the money being made here and how is it moving?
Who runs the rom site? What other things do the same folks run on the same servers? Who provides the infrastructure? Who runs the physical servers? Are they stolen goods? When we're in an illegal market, the people running things are often organized crime that has many ventures.
Do I view add-on illegal gambling sites that use the same illegal infrastructure as "actual crimes", where people hand over their money to even more than usually rigged gambling games?
What about the organized piracy streaming sites that have millions of subscribers?
What about all the consumer protections we don't get like fake ads, cookies trying to steal your information, passwords or whatever because they're on an illegal site? What about all the other avoidance of how we regulate society for fair competition, consumer rights etc? Taxation?
Corrupt countries have no future because people don't believe in the rule of law. The downstream effects can be devastating. Like in many Baltic states right now.
Digital piracy funds other crimes in just the same ways that piracy of goods and medicine do.
Should the law differentiate between "mom and pop fake designer bags" (who knows who's blackmailing/extorting mom and pop because what they do is illegal) and some weird definition of "industrial piracy" based on who's committing the crime?
Society needs all of this to be illegal, and needs to enforce laws as part of the social contract. We can't have laws against shoplifting in physical stores if the police just let people go without consequence if someone's caught stealing red handed.
See this comment for more specifics on how
I hear what you're saying, but I still don't understand the profit pipeline here.
There are some sites that charge people less than the legal version. That I understand, I can see where the money is coming from. Generally on torrent sites, there's no business model, because the hosters don't actually have to host the software themselves. The seeds will be people that already own the software, not necessarily related at all to the people running the site. I suppose there'll be a small amount of profit from ads, but no serious pirate will click on a rom site without their adblocker on. So I don't understand why the mafia would host a torrent site for some GBA roms.
You're comparing digital piracy to stealing, and perhaps so does Danish law, but very very few countries equate the two. Stealing is defined as depriving someone of something, which piracy doesn't do. Piracy is usually defined as IP infringement, which is a different offense, often civil and not criminal. Again, I'll defer to you on Danish law.
The reason I'm digging deep into this is because it very important to me is that this law is used to protect children from exploition and not to make sure people can't watch Lion King for free. I tentatively support the Australian social media ban, for example. However, I do not believe in the concept of copyright as the modern world has formulated it, and would resist any attempts to tighten it, which this law seems to do.
From what I understand of this law (and I can't read Danish, so please correct me), it seems I'd probably write to my MP asking them make sure that the provisions of the law protecting children and cracking down on the mafia can't also be used by the police and corporations to enforce their copyright on normal individuals. If they were unwilling to do this, I would immediately assume that "protect the children" is being used as an emotive cover for unrelated policy changes because your legislative body doesn't have the confidence that they could crack down on piracy and IP infringement just on its own.
Hey, I don't know about you, but I routinely download books and ISO standards from libgen. Ask any researcher if they know sci-hub. Ask for their opinion.
Anyway.
Likely ROM nerds. Back in the day, sites like HOTU were ran by nerds. Nowadays, sites like Nyaa are ran by nerds. There were boxtorrents, quality anime tracker, definitely nerds.
Likely not much. It's risky, because some idiotic overly eager law enforcement goon can take it all away any day.
Usually a guy with an internet connection. Sometimes couple of those, maybe a small local ISP. Sometimes larger colocation housing with a thick connection.
The usual stuff still applies, you need fire retardant systems in the room, AC, not being in a flood zone...
The nerds.
Are you crazy??! Why? Compared to price of electricity, AC and connectivity, refurbished server hardware is peanuts. Especially if there are tens of thousands of people willing to send you single digit dollar donations just to keep the site going.
Yeah, sure. They also scan manga and have it translated by other people. Or they might -gasp- be working with people on modding consoles to play pirated games. :scream-emoji:
You are way out of touch.
The best movie, music, and tv archives are all pirate sites with draconian rules about quality. The have better search engines and usually near-perfect metadata....often even for music releases that don't even exist in discogs or musicbrainz.
You will find arguements about whether tv episodes should be named based on air date or dvd ordering.
You'll see movies get trumped because somebody was able to encode the source at a marginally better quality.
You'll find musicians that have less than 1k followers. You'll find vinyl rips of recordings that would otherwise be lost to the sands of time. You want an immaculately digitized copy of the quadrophic release of Dark Side of the Moon? You'll find it. You want the UK release of a random vinyl album from 1988 that had a marginally differerent audio mastering on it's third pressing than it's CD release? You'll find it.
My father inlaw had been hunting for some random record from his teen years for decades, online and off. Found it in 30 seconds on a few choice sites.
You want a copy of Daria with the original music when it aired on TV? It's there.
Videogames that have been wiped from existence because their music licensing ran out? They're there.
Pirates are archiving and making available pretty much all content better than any of the legal rightsholders.
You want to experience what TV was like in 1998? Download a ripped VHS with the tag 'woc' (with original commercials).
There are old episodes of Doctor Who that we only have copies of because some bootlegger was distributing them illegally.
Fix the wanton destruction of our culture by the companies that own it, and then we can argue about the peanuts that they're trying to claw from the people who are doing the work that the companies should have been doing from the start.
My country has every single print paper published since we got a national library full text searchable and accessible online.
I can explicitly "share, copy, distribute and spread this work" as long as I credit the creator correctly and don't use the work commercially. The creators of print papers are compensated for this forced "private copying" that is a limitation in local copyright law.
It's similar for novels/books. Practically all published works in the native language are required to be sent to the national library for digitization and archival.
The issue isn't the companies. The legislators are the issue. Society needs to invest in the area. There's no reason not to require sensible archival of loads of content for posterity and making it available for all (while compensating creators for use) after a reasonable amount of time.
Remember that time US tried to prohibit alcohol and mafia took over?
In my humble opinion, DMCA has to go. Copyright should be cut to 2 years + yearly paid extensions with a 5 year limit. Then it's public domain and you little Danish student theater can run with it as can your national TV.
Your "cure" is merely making the black market more dangerous, thus shadier and riskier to average folk. Even simple legalization of peer-to-peer media exchange would instantly bring all torrent trackers to Denmark, where you can e.g. mandate they do not show ads and must be not-for-profit, ran by a registered organization...
What this law does is bowing to US media companies, nothing else. Your government actively helps US monopoly. Congratulations.
You know what that means in actuality?
It means that whatever government declares an illegal site gets to force every ISP, DNS provider, and web host to shutdown whatver they want without due process. And to ban providing any service which allows that circumvention.
Is the Great Firewall of China a good thing? Becuase that is, in essence, what you are arguing. That every country should be able to fully curate what it's population is permitted to see. In secret, with no oversight.
And that attempting to circumvent that, for any reason, should be criminalized.
That's not how it works at all. There are regulations and procedures that need to be followed to block or seize a website. We're talking court orders or seizure warrants in all countries it's reasonable to compare ourselves to in a Danish context (that's mostly true for a generally Western context too).
Where have I stated that I'm for totalitarian states and dictatorships having free reign to manipulate and suppress their populations?
Is that ever a reasonable view to ascribe to someone on tildes without that user explicitly stating they're pro-dictators?
What my argument in actuality means is that governments, following due process, need to have the ability to disallow access to a website and ban services that allow circumvention of those bans, then yes that's precisely what I'm arguing is paramount to have in well-regulated democracies.
I'm not prescribing that to be the standard to be followed in non-democracies. Is this something that should be the case in Turkey or Egypt? Probably not, if you're forcing me to draw a line somewhere.
What's the implication of governments not being able in practicality to stop people from accessing the most terrible stuff online?
What're the consequences of not banning access to the very worst humanity can display online?
I urge everyone who doesn't think they share my views on this issue to think long and well on those issues. Think terrorism, making poisons, guides to defrauding others, revenge porn, child porn,, think rigged online gambling sites, think phishing sites, sites pretending to be real services, fake company websites and other IP and copyright infringement, think all the way down to the for-pay services that sell access to illegal content (streaming, entertainment, live sports, book sand on and on).
I understand there are many that have knee-jerk reactions against a regulated internet. They're wrong. Every person I've ever talked to about this topic in person has had to acknowledge that they actually want their government to be able to ban access to online things.
The only real issue at hand is where they want to draw the line. I'm all for the courts being able to ban illegal services and circumvention tools in line with the rest of all the sensible laws that are on the books.
Again, what's the workable alternative in real life? Why can no-one ever present this alternative if there is one? (hint: there isn't one, even in theory).
To keep it short, some form of totalitarian control will inevitably develop in any place where the infrastructure to allow it has been put in place. It won't look the same on the surface, but the practical difference is negligible.
All the safeguards in the world won't make a difference, because there's always a way through or around them, always a justification. All it takes is for those with abusive intentions to come into power.
See case #1: The USA.
Trump is not some weird edge case that popped up out nowhere.
The current status quo, where undoubtably more crimes occur because of it, but it do be what it is. I’m ok with more crimes occurring for this slice of civil liberties.
Maybe you’re not, but saying that the view is “wrong” seems hilariously absolutist.
I don't know, is it undoubtable? There's nothing to say that a greatly expanded digital surveillance infrastructure would actually be used to prevent more crimes. Sure, it's likely that some number of crimes could be prevented with it, but there would also be some number of additional civil rights violations, and the opportunity to wield that surveillance infrastructure for selfish purposes might become more interesting than using it to prevent crimes. Hell, if deployed by a corrupt government - or inherited by one - you might imagine, being corrupt, that they would use it to preserve organised crime!
So actually, I think nacho misses the point with the effects of banning tools like VPNs, but I don't think we necessarily need to accept their premise either.
Got a source on this?
Your talking points sounds like they were written by Rettighedsaliancen. Not a neutral party.
I'm sure you understand why I'm not going to waste my time doing this for someone who's accusing me of regurgitating talking points for a government body, rather than recognizing that others may not share their personal views on an issue.
There's no reason for me to believe you're willing to engage in good faith.
That's a lot of emotional appealing to online child safety to persuade giving up all your online rights. I wouldn't trust an authority enough to support this.
No, that's precisely what it isn't.
This is about hardcore organized crime and them financing their activities.
I too would like free stuff if it didn't fund literal guns for hire, smuglers, human traffickers, rogue states like North Korea and so on.
However, we know that's who this supports. The argument is not "think of the children". It's evidence-based, 2025 knowledge of who runs the world's pirating empires.
How exactly does free stuff fund terrorists and the like? I'm not trying to be combative, I'm genuinely curious. My impression of online piracy has always been that it's a giant money furnace. Giving stuff away for free is not exactly a good business model, after all.
Many pirate sites run ads, but I'd be surprised if those ads earned much more than the cost for hosting the website and the files.
The illegal streaming sites (like illegal restreams of sporting events etc.) are often run by organized crime. We're talking heavy duty subscription models etc.
Here's a couple of short overview Interpol pieces: 1 , 2 on the matter.
Here's an EU/ Europol page that links to much more on the topic.
Here's a RAND report from 2008 on the issue, although the claims here seem somewhat overstated from that time. The world has gone much more in the direction that they seem to state the world was in at that point.
Here's an EU bust from November where they took down 47 million in crypto disrupting around 70 piracy services, all professionally run.
This is a huge industry. Paid torrent trackers are the same.
Because of the lack of digital oversight, it's extremely hard to prove that mafia-like groups are connected to various online crimes, and what online crimes.
Just like it's extremely hard to prove what state actor steals cryptocurrencies, performs online sabotage, perpetrate ransomware crimes, hack and steal personal information and so on.
And also how it's often very hard to prove who're the traffickers, smuglers, organizers etc. behind organized crime, with anything from avocado-related crime to providing embargoed countries with weapons.
I read through the Europol links, and the film piracy section of the pdf. But none of that actually addresses what is being discussed. I don’t think anybody is disagreeing with the fact that paid piracy sites are, often, run by organized crime and used to fund other illicit activity.
The way torrents work, the website doesn’t actually host the content data. The website hosting costs can be extremely minimal. With magnet links instead of torrent files, the data hosting can be almost nothing. Back when the Pirate Bay was busted, people were sharing archives of the entire site, which weighed in at 90mb. You read that right. The entire Pirate Bay website was only 90mb. So hosting costs can be extremely minimal. I wouldn’t be surprised if you could host one of the most popular torrent websites for less than $20/month.
And these websites don’t cost money to access. So, even if run by organized crime, how are they making money from this? Every instance you linked is about a group selling pirated goods. They didn’t even mention groups giving away pirated goods for free. (If they did, please let me know; it is possible I missed it.)
Edit: also worth noting that none of the listed instances were enabled, or even facilitated, by vpns.
Edit 2: I also think it’s hilarious that they mention the markup of these disks. « A second estimate, issued in 2005 by the UK
National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS), found that a DVD
manufactured in Malaysia for about $0.70 was marked up more than
1,150 percent and sold on the streets of London for the equivalent of
$9. » The production costs of commercial legal movies is very similar, and they sell for much higher. So the markup for legal movies is way higher than pirated movies. I just don’t see how markup is relevant to piracy at all.
Let' see...
OK, so, South Korea. The country where presidents routinely end up in jail, typically right after their tenure, sometimes during. Country ran by Chaebols, where 20% people earn 80% income.
Basically a country ran by olligarchs. Has a beef with a guy who forwarded TV streams to Indonesia.
OK, I can see why. And. I. Don't. Care. I think they should stop all anti-piracy efforts and maybe do something about the brutal, oppressive olligarchy instead.
This is getting silly.
OpenAI, currently.
On the other hand, VPNs facilitate people from very repressed countries to get news, stay up to date, organise, and altogether fight for peace and democracy.
I'd rather have these people have a safe alternative before I would take down the walls for every citizen worldwide, potentially leaving them open to malicious government overreach just to catch criminals we can already catch.
For some people their anonymity is crucial to their survival. Gay Saudi's, partisan Russians, repressed Nepali youth, freedom fighting Hong Kongers, and I could go on and on.
Losing anonymity online signs the death warrant for a lot of people. I find your line of thinking dangerous.
Even "benign" actors like giant corpos will use the lack of anonimity to become even worse at tracking you than they are now.
Besides, non-law abiding citizens would disregard a ban anyway. You can't unilaterally decide to block encryption and expect criminals to simply stop using it. There are purpose built encryption phones already, changes to encryption and commercially available VPNs will not stop that. If anything it will push regular citizens into the same sphere of influence just to stay safe.
Lastly, if a (supra)government truly wants to get you, they'll pull a Silk Road, an Archetyp, an Alphabay, Hydra, Dream Market or whatever else Interpol manages to break into and dismantle. Truly, no need to tear down the protection of the average citizen to force them to rely on the -at best- benign neglect of their government.
Me standing over my 17 year old monitoring their every action is not trust. It is surveilance which prevents them from developing into a full human being. Trust is throwing your car keys to a teenager and saying 'be back by 10.'
You punish them if they violate the trust. Not surviel them so that they don't even have a chance to build it.
I'm not OK with the whole planet being studied 24/7 so that some crimes can theoretically be prevented.
If they're not actually fighting that stuff, yes. VPN bans are like media DRM: it punishes the most passive users and lazy pirates, while not affecting the most dedicated pirates. All your subjects above sound very dedicated.
It isn't. Until it is. And then the government is now your biggest enemy, and has an army ready to enforce its evils instead of small collections of human filth. We have plenty of examples at large today.
Its a start. Then we can male sure the perception is real privacy.
If you've seen other comments of mine on this site, you likely can guess my stance on this sort of approach- but I will merely highlight two sentences from this report: