Deeper and deeper SOPA, all darker coming

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

So do not think, please, that the law adopted a week ago, this tightening will end. On the same day on the Izvestia website I had the opportunity to read an article by Vladimir Zykov “The Ministry of Culture will introduce music, images and books into the anti-piracy law ”, which I can even call unpleasant even today in the morning, and yesterday I felt worse physically all day . Here's what you can read in this article about the latest initiatives of the Ministry of Culture:

• Unlicensed lovers are once again called pirates. (Perhaps we’ll get used to this trifle soon and even begin to rejoice that we aren’t stoned by suicidal pedophiles, as is done in another well-known Internet restriction law.)
   
• Those who hoped that the fight for copyright would be limited to films (in extreme cases, also to television series), it was time to abandon this hope. The new law will apply to sound recordings, and drawings, and photographs, and texts - all categories of copyright and related rights will apply.
   
• All website owners will be legally ordered to either deanonymize (openly indicate their mailing address in the real world on the website) or spam (openly indicate their e-mail address on the website and read all mail coming to it) in order to receive complaints from legal traders. Moreover: on each site there will be (by legislative enforcement) a special form for receiving complaints from legal traders.
   
• The reaction to complaints should be no less rapid than Jack Bauer’s: within 24 hours , the site owner must either block access to the material complained of or accept the closure of the entire site by Roskomnadzor.
   
• The publisher of the material can send its objections to the author of the complaint, but the material should still be removed from the web by law for 14 days, 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 the court decision comes into force.
   
• The same rules will concern , and hyperlinks , which received a complaint that they lead to unlicensed content published by third parties.
   
• For violation of the procedure for restricting access to information, fines are envisaged that can reach one million rubles. (As you can see, the Medinsky ministry is striving to fulfill Milyavsky’s most terrible dream , at least by half; unless they have been offering prisons for twenty years now.)

But we must add to this that in modern Russian circumstances, the blockage will inevitably “hit the squares”; for example, on the same day on August 7, it was discovered that Beeline was blocking access to the entire LiveJournal blog hosting (justifying this with the extremist publication of one of the bloggers); True, they later unblocked it .

Therefore, I suspect that the philosopher Konstantin Anatolyevich Krylov (who was relatively recently tried in Russia for calling to end the existing economic model) was absolutely right when he noticed that now an understanding of everything that is being done, when such an understanding comes, causes fierce longing: “ bastards, again ” .And really, again. We have seen all this more than once: as caustic gas, the restrictions of the Internet tend to spread until they meet equal opposition - and seek to eradicate the obstacles that have such resistance.

For example, there was a list of extremist materials - and now this is not enough: individual symbols are going to be declared extremist .

They pointed to abuses of the law aimed at combating the propaganda of drug addiction, suicide and pedophilia - and now this is not enough: a bill is being prepared that will make all the abuses listed on Habrahabr completely legal. All to one! 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 at the fact that they closed the EVE Online game site for “drugs” , which described the use of fictional chemicals for fictional characters - please, information on how to use “substances with similar effects to narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances” is now prohibited . The definition of “child pornography” was even broadened to such an extreme that ksenobayt rightly noticed : this is done as if on purpose in order to meet exactly my fears about banning anime.

Anime for me is a kind of mining canary, gentlemen, readers. In the English-language Wikipedia (and in the sources indicated by it), you can read that miners have long had a custom (in Britain until 1987) to take this gentle songbird with them underground. And if she showed signs of excruciating suffering, and then died, in a powerless reproach, raising her touchingly thin beak to the invisible sky, then this was the surest sign that the miner’s most terrible and deadly enemy is entering the mine - poisonous mine gas (for example, methane or carbon monoxide).

I hear with sadness: in that mine, in the face where many of us work on multi-kilobyte sites, the singing of the seiyu ceases. Therefore, I have reason to fear that soon many sites will look likethere’s that screenshot (apparently Kuwaiti) in which, instead of a relatively harmless article, the reader sees a notice banning access “for pornography”:



They may object to this, that for Kuwait, blocking such sites is a religious question.

It can be answered that for many the question of free copying (with which I began my discussion) is a religious question. I mentioned this on Habrahabr on January 17, 2012 in the blog post “ Jesus Christ and the Ethics of Free Copying”», где сожалел о душах тех людей, которые принимают новое вероисповедание («копимизм») в попытке отстоять своё право на свободу копирования — и сообщал, что лучше было бы им заново (и повнимательнее) перечитать Евангелие от Марка да Евангелие от Матфея. С тех пор этот совет стал ещё актуальнее в России: знайте, что в начале августа 2013 года у здания Президиума Российской Академии наук совершилась под восьмибитную музыку первая в России свадьба по обряду копимистскому и пастафарианскому.

In addition, there are forces in Russia that operate and for which imposing restrictions on the Internet is a religious issue no less than in Kuwait. For the first time, this clearly appeared at the moment when excerpts from the movie “Innocence of Muslims” were published on YouTube: in September 2012, one of the Pakistani ministers offered a reward for the murder of the author of this film, calling him “defamed the image of the Prophet,” and Gray was astounded I saw in early February that YouTube has been blocked for many months in a row by Beeline throughout the North Caucasus Federal District of Russia, including the Stavropol Territory.

But it is known that the interests of the people of this belief may be affected not only such an ax, as the film "Innocence of Muslims", but things more mundane - well, for example, the sale of alcohol (as it is rumored , felt the residents near Moscow Bykovo). Or an article about animeshnikov viewed on the Internet in Qatar.

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

As always, the fate of anime (manga, ranobe, visual novels) in Russia can and should serve us as a litmus test (and a mining canary).

          “I heard that Kaname Madoka
           smeared the image of the Prophet.
           If the rumor is not a hoax -
           Wait for the Muslim response, ”-
           He said , smiling cruelly.

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

          “I have heard that Shchirai Kuroko
           blamed the image of the Prophet.
           If the rumor is not a hoax -
           Wait for the Muslim response, ”
           he said , smiling cruelly.

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

          “I was told that Nasu Kinoko
           Offended the assassins of the East.
           If the rumor is not a hoax -
           Wait for the response of the Muslims, ”
           He said , smiling cruelly.

I look with sorrow at Tatarstan, for example. Last summer, prosecutors prosecuted a man for simply expressing feelings at the address of a frame from the American History X video; really with time and "Nazo noKanojo X " waiting for the same fate?