November 12, 2015 at 22:20Before lifetime blocking Pleer.com wrote an open letter to the state
On November 3, 2015, the music site Pleer.com was blocked for life by the Moscow City Court (the decision will take effect 30 days after the appeal is reviewed). This is the second case of lifelong blocking of sites in Russia, after the October decision to block 11 sites.
For more than two years, Pleer.com has not been placing any advertising and taking no money from users. This is a non-profit project, so the site administration is not going to actively resist the blockage, although it will appeal to the court.
But before the resource was de facto blocked in Russia, the creators of Pleer.com published an open letter to the state, in which they expressed everything that they think about it.
Pleer.com is banned by Universal Music. On this occasion, the administration writes: “The first scapegoat was our small project, which takes 90% of the music from Vkontakte, but, unfortunately, fighting with us is much easier than with Vkontakte. Perhaps we are somewhere wrong or childishly naive, but very saddened by the way the state strangles Runet as a whole. ”
The authors of an open letter distinguish five main points, according to which the state behaves inappropriately on the Internet (published with abbreviations).
1. Inhibition of runet development
Already, many projects are dying at the thought stage, because most of the current IT projects are somehow related to the audio, video, text, erotic component, or the sites are often populated by the users themselves, which could potentially lead to a blocking of the resource. Accordingly, no one wants to risk either time or money to develop a project that can die with just one stroke of a pen.
2. Media on the Internet
For you, as for the state, it is very important to have a mouthpiece of influence on the public consciousness. And while such a mouthpiece remains mainly television and radio. But now the Internet is so developed that the influence on the masses is gradually becoming more online, and in a few years the “First Channel” will be able to influence only the elderly inactive audience and gradually its effect will disappear.
3. There are no clear rules.
The mechanism of blocking content has already been debugged on the world Internet for many years, whether it be child pornography or a pirated film. Over the past 20 years, copyright holders have always successfully written abuse (complaints) to hosters. And either the content was deleted voluntarily quickly, or the hoster blocked the entire server. Based on complaints from foreign copyright holders, we constantly work with this and constantly remove illegal content, and we also removed Arbenin, who are trying to block us, a few weeks ago, right after we received the complaint.
4. Dawn of anti-lock brakes
By massively blocking sites in this way, we run the risk of running into the same problem as the United States a hundred years ago with an anti-alcohol company: the ban on something so popular leads to the dawn of clandestine workarounds. Sooner or later, we will come to the dawn of the anti-blockers, when the blocked mass of sites will exceed the critical mark, and bypassing the locks will become the first necessity. Every citizen who does not have special knowledge will be able to bypass the locks (now this is the TURBO button in the Yandex browser or Opera), and in a few years, I think, there will be paid low-cost solutions that will generally be automatically turned on on the necessary sites . And then our state will no longer be able to block a single site, because after installing the new operating system, one of the first installed programs will be an anti-blocker,
5. Dossier of the Russians
The third world war, which is informational, has already begun. We have already handed over the files of all Russians to the hands of a potential adversary: Google and Apple already know our entire phone book, store all our photos in the cloud, and save the geodata of all our locations; Facebook and Whatsapp store all correspondence, all sent photos and videos, and all this information will be stored in archives for many years. A likely adversary will have incriminating evidence in the form of bad photos, videos, correspondence, dubious calls to people who now decide little, but in 10-20 years some of them will come to power, and then, thanks to this information, it will be possible to influence many. Without allowing runet to develop, we lose precious users who go to foreign sites.
The author of an open letter calls on the state to help the development of Runet, because it has strategic importance:
“Dear state! I do not urge to turn a blind eye to piracy, but I ask you to review the policy of blocking and the development of Runet in general! No need to clean up with a sledgehammer! The problems that are being laid down now will come back to us in many years, and then it will be too late to solve them. In our country, brilliant IT specialists who can invent world projects, but we need to create a very favorable climate for the development of IT. ”
For more than two years, Pleer.com has not been placing any advertising and taking no money from users. This is a non-profit project, so the site administration is not going to actively resist the blockage, although it will appeal to the court.
But before the resource was de facto blocked in Russia, the creators of Pleer.com published an open letter to the state, in which they expressed everything that they think about it.
Pleer.com is banned by Universal Music. On this occasion, the administration writes: “The first scapegoat was our small project, which takes 90% of the music from Vkontakte, but, unfortunately, fighting with us is much easier than with Vkontakte. Perhaps we are somewhere wrong or childishly naive, but very saddened by the way the state strangles Runet as a whole. ”
The authors of an open letter distinguish five main points, according to which the state behaves inappropriately on the Internet (published with abbreviations).
1. Inhibition of runet development
Already, many projects are dying at the thought stage, because most of the current IT projects are somehow related to the audio, video, text, erotic component, or the sites are often populated by the users themselves, which could potentially lead to a blocking of the resource. Accordingly, no one wants to risk either time or money to develop a project that can die with just one stroke of a pen.
2. Media on the Internet
For you, as for the state, it is very important to have a mouthpiece of influence on the public consciousness. And while such a mouthpiece remains mainly television and radio. But now the Internet is so developed that the influence on the masses is gradually becoming more online, and in a few years the “First Channel” will be able to influence only the elderly inactive audience and gradually its effect will disappear.
3. There are no clear rules.
The mechanism of blocking content has already been debugged on the world Internet for many years, whether it be child pornography or a pirated film. Over the past 20 years, copyright holders have always successfully written abuse (complaints) to hosters. And either the content was deleted voluntarily quickly, or the hoster blocked the entire server. Based on complaints from foreign copyright holders, we constantly work with this and constantly remove illegal content, and we also removed Arbenin, who are trying to block us, a few weeks ago, right after we received the complaint.
4. Dawn of anti-lock brakes
By massively blocking sites in this way, we run the risk of running into the same problem as the United States a hundred years ago with an anti-alcohol company: the ban on something so popular leads to the dawn of clandestine workarounds. Sooner or later, we will come to the dawn of the anti-blockers, when the blocked mass of sites will exceed the critical mark, and bypassing the locks will become the first necessity. Every citizen who does not have special knowledge will be able to bypass the locks (now this is the TURBO button in the Yandex browser or Opera), and in a few years, I think, there will be paid low-cost solutions that will generally be automatically turned on on the necessary sites . And then our state will no longer be able to block a single site, because after installing the new operating system, one of the first installed programs will be an anti-blocker,
5. Dossier of the Russians
The third world war, which is informational, has already begun. We have already handed over the files of all Russians to the hands of a potential adversary: Google and Apple already know our entire phone book, store all our photos in the cloud, and save the geodata of all our locations; Facebook and Whatsapp store all correspondence, all sent photos and videos, and all this information will be stored in archives for many years. A likely adversary will have incriminating evidence in the form of bad photos, videos, correspondence, dubious calls to people who now decide little, but in 10-20 years some of them will come to power, and then, thanks to this information, it will be possible to influence many. Without allowing runet to develop, we lose precious users who go to foreign sites.
The author of an open letter calls on the state to help the development of Runet, because it has strategic importance:
“Dear state! I do not urge to turn a blind eye to piracy, but I ask you to review the policy of blocking and the development of Runet in general! No need to clean up with a sledgehammer! The problems that are being laid down now will come back to us in many years, and then it will be too late to solve them. In our country, brilliant IT specialists who can invent world projects, but we need to create a very favorable climate for the development of IT. ”