Japan will make it a crime to download… “academic texts from the Internet. The new law will take effect on January 1, 2021.” Two years in prison and an $18k fine, for public “pasting hyperlinks of illegal websites”. The Japanese parliament passed the new law on Friday.

One imagines there will be mass civil disobedience over such a disproportionate law. Doing things like posting links to the most obscure Elsevier textbook freely available on Archive.org, all over official government websites, and then publicly daring the authorities to prosecute.