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Notes -
Dispatches from the War on Horny/Payment Processors: the other shoe has dropped for Pixiv.
A year and a half ago, Pixiv made signs that they'd be clamping down on content on some of their services to appease Visa and MasterCard. Today, Pixiv announces that US and UK users will face restrictions on content they can upload. (Specific details here.)
Currently remains to be seen how much this affects the Western artists who are on Pixiv, but it doesn't bode well. Some think this portends a coming era of digital pillarization, and while I won't rule out the possibility that things will get so walled off that VPNs become a necessity, it's hard to say how likely that actually is.
EDIT: This may be the rationale for the change.
Texas recently started enforcing HB 1181, a viewer-age-verification law. The sort which intends to make it very annoying to distribute pornography if and only if one intends to run a business in the U.S.. Hosting a server out of Czechoslovakia is, as I understand it, still untouchable.
Pornhub’s parent company responded by cutting all services to Texas. Should a Texan IP address make a request to their site, he will receive instead an angry letter about his lawmakers’ shortsightedness, questionable legal footing, and so on. Other sites have followed suit. The argument goes that 1) the law only hurts the most compliant companies, and 2) it fails a variety of Constitutional protections.
Naturally, it was wildly popular, passing 141-2. It has also survived legal challenges up to the 5th Circuit Court. Even though one of the provisions was struck down as improper government speech, proponents insist that the rest is perfectly above-board.
So far, it’s looking like another step towards pillarization.
Czechoslovakia does not exist for almost 32 years, maybe you meant Czechia? And if yes would you care to elaborate what is going on? It seems interesting to me.
Sorry, I was using it as a generic Eastern Bloc stand-in. Really, any of the smaller countries. I don’t know the legal mechanism, but torrent or vice sites are stereotypically hosted on these more permissive domains. Kind of like how sci-hub.se currently has .ru and .st mirrors.
I know that in Slovakia we have quite “benevolent” laws, when things like EULA are not recognized, as we require intent in form of paper. Which makes sense - you cannot recognize who clicked “yes” and then keep someboy responsible, we are very much paper country in that regard. Also we consider downloading anything as legal - not uploading in torrents - but in general I saw a lot of rulings favorable to “pirates” here - as long that they were careful for normal things. Things like child porn are a big NO and you can expect to attract attention like a magnet and some large physical operation with some very “liberal” explanation of law. Don’t do it here.
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