Interesting conversation! I think actually several things are being conflated here: 1. Copyright law. I think the Pirate Bay are wrong to distribute music & film they don't own the rights to. The law of our land holds that creators are allowed to profit from their work. The Pirate Bay disagree and chose to break the law. Which side of that argument are you on Terence? It's not clear to me. Further, as TPB are breaking the law, it's within copyright holder's rights to prosecute and/or seek those sites' closure. 2. Blocking websites Child abuse sites should be taken down when found. It's about right and wrong. Most people would agree it's wrong, so it should be tackled. I'm happy for ISP's to block that material wherever and however possible. And I accept that there's the risk of an occasional false positive and the accidental removal of a legal site (such as the temporary Cleanfeed / Wiki incident). 3. Fascism "That, to me, looks like creeping fascism.", "Fascism is the subservience of the state to commerce". No. It really - really - isn't. Read about Nazi Germany in the '30s. Murder of politial rivals. Institionalised racism, oppression, and thuggery. That's Fascism. A centre-right party doing badly thought out reforms of the NHS is not fascism. That's is really insulting to the millions of victims of fascism throughout history. Fascism is a horrible thing and I think the left here in the UK throw it around far, far too easily without realising what they're saying. -- Conflating all these leads to confused arguments. I think we can resolve point 1 easily enough - do you download copyrighted material? That answers your stance there easily enough. Point 2: I personally don't buy the slippery slope argument of ISPs blocking first abuse sites and then suddenly deciding to block the wikipedia page about democracy. We're not China or Iran and never will be. You might think this complacent, but the political system here has come from a different place than those countries and we're not likely to suddenly end up there. Point 3: let's stop throwing the F word around; it's irrelevant for the most part.