14 DAY TRIAL // The entertainment industry is desperate to hold onto its ways and its revenues without having to do much in return.
It's been fighting piracy for years in the hope that making it hard or impossible for people to get to what they want will, somehow, magically, make them pay the very companies that are preventing them from getting what they want.
More recently, the media corporations and their trade groups have been finding alternative ways of dealing with pirate sites, for example forcing ISPs to block them.
But these blocks are far from perfect; there are plenty of proxy sites out there. The industry is working on blocking those too, but even then, people can use virtual private networks to get around the blocks.
Well, at least for now. Both MasterCard and Visa, two big representatives of another industry that doesn't want to adapt, have now started blocking payments for VPNs which may be used by pirates.
The credit card companies are already refusing to work with file sharing sites. PayPal, the major online payments processor, has similar policies.
Now, the credit card companies are targeting VPNs and other anonymizing services. In a world which is in desperate need of tools for anonymous communication, privacy, and secrecy, making it impossible for people to pay for these tools seems like a particularly heinous move. But the NSA definitely approves.
The new policy was instituted in secrecy and went live this week. Already, the iPredator VPN service, created by Pirate Bay spokesman Peter Sunde, is feeling the effects of the ban, as its payments processing company Payson stopped allowing credit card payments.
Several other VPN services use Payson. Most have alternative payment methods, and bank transfers still work, as a last resort. But credit cards remain the simplest way of paying for stuff online.