[AusNOG] Australian senate passes controversial anti-piracy, website-blocking laws

[Karl Auer]

On Tue, 2015-06-23 at 21:48 +1000, Shain Singh wrote:
> On 23 June 2015 at 20:59, Joseph Goldman <joe at apcs.com.au> wrote:
> Also, just because something is easy to bypass doesn't make it less legal.
> It is easy to bypass underage drinking laws as an example, that doesn't
> potentially mean we shouldn't have that law.

Spectacularly bad analogy.

Laws that affect underage drinkers or their suppliers have zero effect
on others (drinkers of legal age or their suppliers).

Censorship laws, in general, affect everybody in some way. Wherever it
is attempted, censorship does one or both of two things: Block access to
legal/desirable information[1] and fail to block access to
illegal/undesirable information[2].

Depending on how poorly they are framed (and almost by definition, none
are framed well), censorship laws also tend to criminalise ordinary and
innocuous activities and/or have a chilling effect on the ordinary,
innocuous and legal activities of ordinary citizens.

People who censor - and ESPECIALLY people who censor for commercial
reasons - have failed utterly to learn from history.

Regards, K.

[1] E.g., blocking "bad" sexual material invariably blocks valuable
information about things like childbirth, sexual assault, sexual health,
gay/lesbian issues, etc.

[2] Because blockers are always playing catch-up. People who want to
disseminate information - especially if they are making money from it -
can relocate, rename, restart, reframe and reinvent themselves far
faster than the blockers can follow. And it costs them almost nothing to
do so.

-- 
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Karl Auer (kauer at biplane.com.au)
http://www.biplane.com.au/kauer
http://twitter.com/kauer389

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