Elftown April Fool’s Day 2009!

As the tradition goes, this year, yet again, the council and the assembly found it necessary to trick the poor citizens of Elftown. And they succeeded, of course, yet again. This time they went for a more serious 'Halloween-ish' prank.
This year’s prank was the following, as posted on the Mainstreet:

Elftown will be disconnected

Due to the new IPRED legislation (Its Swedish implementation: http://sv.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ipred-lagen) that takes effect on the 1st of April 2009 in Sweden, Elftown's Internet connection has been ordered to shut down. Antipiratbyrån (Swedish friends of RIAA and their like) has never liked social networking sites as they make people read less books, watch fewer movies and write their own stuff instead of buying it from the big intellectual monopolists (The organization's owners), so right after 0:00 o'clock it was prepared with "evidence" of copyright monopoly infringements against [Hedda] to close down his Internet connection as soon as possible.

They are also in the works to shut Facebook and all other social networking sites down. This was triggered by the fact that The Pirate Bay has added a share-button (similar to the ones on Elftown) so that people can post links to content that the copyright monopolists feel is forbidden to share with your friends.

Unfortunately this is not the end of it for our American members. As a part of the latest stimulus package, the Obama administration has decided to double the amount of lawyers who work with suing people about copyright monopoly infringements of all kinds. As it's proven that people who have an interest in things also copy it a lot, the US government's vast monitoring of the Internet will now be used to bring you all into court. One main focus will be targeting artists who create content with any kind of resemblance or inspiration from anyone who hasn't been dead for more than 90 years (unless that person's heir has touched the work in any way, because then it's 90 years after their death). So if you have ever posted your art on the Internet, you can expect to be charged 10 cents per time it's viewed regardless if you're able to take it down or not (But the copyright monopolists promise that they will settle for about 50% of your income, so don't worry about getting broke!).

Of course all of this is your own fault. If you hadn't been buying DVDs and CDs, the copy monopolists would have had no money to buy politicians. But not everything is black because Madonna is already so poor that she has to go Malawi to be able to afford yet another adoption. And the ones most hurt by piracy must be the artists on top of The Pirate Bay's music top-list: Metallica, U2, Pink Floyd and Britney so just imagine how they are living on the streets now!

This news will later on be updated with with dates of when Elftown will be disconnected.