Deeper and deeper SOPA, all the darker things to come

Yesterday (August 7), Kirill Martynov published an article entitled “ Russian SOPA ” on the website of the business newspaper Vzglyad, in which he recalled that when the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) was submitted to the US Congress in October 2011, it encountered a massive resistance of the people: hundreds of thousands of citizens took part in the protests. After that, the most controversial item was first thrown out of SOPA, and then the bill was postponed completely (“for revision”) for an indefinite period. In Russia, barely a hundred people went on a picket for Internet freedom in Moscow (the rest were limited to intra-Internet “strikes” and signing a petition on a government website), so that the authorities were toughened by the tightening of laws restricting Internet freedom.

So do not think, please, that by a law passed a week ago, this tightening will end. On the same day yesterday, on the Izvestia website, I happened to read Vladimir Zykov’s article “The Ministry of Culture will bring music, images and books to the anti-piracy law ”, which I can call unpleasant even yesterday morning, but yesterday I felt physically worse . Here is what can be read in this article about the new initiatives of the Ministry of Culture:

• Fans of unlicensed women are once again called pirates. (Perhaps, we will soon get used to this trifle, and we will even rejoice that we are not stumped by suicidal pedophiles, as is done in another well-known law restricting the Internet.)
  
• Those who hoped that the fight for copyright is limited to movies (in extreme cases, also television shows), it’s time to give up that hope. The new law will affect both sound recordings, and drawings, and photographs, and texts — all categories of copyright and related rights will be affected.
  
• All site owners will be legally instructed to either de-anonymize (openly indicate your mailing address in the real world on the site), or open spam (openly indicate your e-mail address on the site and read all mail you receive to it) to receive complaints from right sellers. Moreover: on each site there will be (for legislative coercion) a special form for receiving complaints from legal traffickers.
  
• The response to complaints should be no less than lightning-fast than that of Jack Bauer: within 24 hours the site owner must either block access to the material to which the complaint has been received, or accept the closure of the entire site by Roskomnadzor.
  
• The publisher of the material may send its objections to the complainant, but the material must still be removed from the web for 14 days according to the law, even if the author of the complaint does not dispute these objections in court. In the case of a trial, the material is blocked until a court decision takes effect.
  
• The same rules will apply to hyperlinks , which will receive a complaint that they lead to unlicensed content published by third parties.
  
• Violation of the procedure for restricting access to information provides for fines that can reach a million rubles. (As can be seen, the Ministry of Medina is striving to fulfill Milyavsky’s most terrible dream , at least by half; only twenty years in prison are not yet offered to be given.)

And it is necessary to add to this that in modern Russian circumstances the blocking will inevitably “hit on the squares”; for example, on the same day, August 7, it was discovered that Beeline is blocking access to the entire LiveJournal blog hosting (justifying this by the extremist publication of one of the bloggers); however, later unblocked .
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Therefore, I suspect that the philosopher Konstantin Anatolyevich Krylov (relatively recently tried in Russia for appealing for an end to the existing economic model) was absolutely right when he noticed that now understanding everything that happens when such an understanding comes, causes fierce longing: “ reptiles, again ” . And it really is again. All this we have seen more than once: as caustic gas, the limitations of the Internet tend to spread until they meet their equal opposition - and seek to eat into the obstacles that exert such opposition.

For example, there was a list of extremist materials - and now there is not enough of this: they are going to declare individual characters extremist.

They pointed out the abuse of the law, aimed at combating the propaganda of drug addiction, suicide and pedophilia - and now there is not enough of this: a bill is being prepared , which will make all of the abuses listed on Habrahabr completely legal. One and all! For example, Habrahabr bloggers fought in court ([ 1 ], [ 2 ]) for the right to ridicule suicide - please, now ridicule is officially equated with propaganda. They were amazed that the site about the game EVE Online , which described the use of fictional chemicals to fictional characters, was closed for “drugs” - please, information on the use of “substances with similar effects on narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances on the human body is now banned” . The definition of “child pornography” has been expanded to such an extreme that ksenobayt rightly remarked : this is done as if on purpose in order to meet precisely my fears about banning anime.

Anime for me is a kind of miner's canary, gentlemen readers. In the English-speaking Wikipedia (and in the sources indicated by it) you can read that the miners have long enough (in Britain - until 1987) it was customary to take this tender songbird under the ground. And if she showed signs of painful suffering, and then exhaled, in a helpless reproach, touching her invisible thin beak to the invisible sky, then this was the surest sign that the mine’s most horrible and deadly enemy — the mine’s toxic gas (for example, methane) or carbon monoxide).

I hear with sadness: in that mine, in the mine, where many of us are working on multi-kilo byte sites, singing is silent. I therefore have reason to fear that soon many websites will look like that screenshot (apparently, Kuwaiti), in which instead of a relatively innocuous article the reader sees a notice denying access “for pornography”:



It may be objected to this that for Kuwait the blocking of such sites is a religious matter.

To this it is possible to answer that for many the question of free copying (with which I began my argument) is a religious question. I mentioned this on Habrahabr on January 17, 2012 in the blog " Jesus Christ and the ethics of free copying ", where I regretted the souls of those people who accept the new religion ("copyimism") in an attempt to defend their right to freedom of copying - and reported that it would be better for them to re-read (and more closely) the Gospel of Mark and the Gospel of Matthew. Since then, this advice has become even more relevant in Russia: know that in early August 2013, the building of the Presidium of the Russian Academy of Sciences held the first Russian wedding in ritual copyimistic and pastafarian, accompanied by eight-bit music .

In addition, there are forces in Russia itself that are acting for which imposing restrictions on the Internet is a religious matter no less than in Kuwait. For the first time, this was clearly manifested at a time when excerpts from the movie “The Innocence of Muslims” were published on YouTube: one of the ministers of Pakistan in September 2012 offered a reward for killing the author of this movie, calling him “discrediting the image of the Prophet”, and Gray with amazement I saw in early February that YouTube for many months in a row remains blocked by Beeline throughout the North Caucasus Federal District of Russia, including the Stavropol region.

But it is known that the interests of people of this religion can be affected not only by such a bang as the film “The Innocence of Muslims”, but also by more mundane things - well, for example, selling alcohol (as the rumors of the Moscow-based Bykovo experienced). Or an article about animeshnikov, viewed on the Internet in Qatar.

That is why not only the First-August law on combating so-called “piracy”, but also the law on protecting the feelings of believers that came into force a month earlier (July 1, 2013) should be counted among those means whose potential impact on Internet freedom is underestimated by us and will inevitably grow without opposition.

As always, the fate of anime (manga, early, visual novels) in Russia can and should serve as a litmus test (and miner's Canary).

"I heard that Kaname Madoka
Disgraced the image of the Prophet.
If the rumor is not a hoax -
Wait for the answer of the Muslims ", -
He said , smiling cruelly.

“I heard that Asakura Ryouko
Disgraced the image of the Prophet.
If the rumor is not a hoax -
Wait for the answer of the Muslims ", -
He said , smiling cruelly.

"I heard that Shchirai Kuroko
Disgraced the image of the Prophet.
If the rumor is not a hoax -
Wait for the answer of the Muslims ", -
He said , smiling cruelly.

“I heard that Imai Momoka
Disgraced the image of the Prophet.
If the rumor is not a hoax -
Wait for the answer of the Muslims ", -
He said , smiling cruelly.

"I was told that Nasa Kinoko
Insulted the assassins of the East.
If the rumor is not a hoax -
Wait for the answer of the Muslims ", -
He said , smiling cruelly.

With sadness I look at Tatarstan, for example. Last summer, prosecutors there persecuted a man for a simple expression of feelings at the address of the frame from the video “American History X”; Surely with time and “Nazo no Kanojo X” is waiting for the same fate?