Except these aren’t orders from above. TPTB laid down a rule of no p2p discussion, but it’s the mods themselves have decided that that includes VPN’s as well.
As engineer_comp_geek has already said, it was discussed amongst the mods and implemented. Nothing to do with any lawyers.
I must admit I didn’t even notice that post when I read the thread before. I fully agree and support the moderation of that post, including removing the links. I find it hard to believe that was your main issue in that thread however, considering you didn’t mention it until your third post, and even then only briefly.
Your first post was to tell us (incorrectly) that the main use for VPN’s was illegal filesharing, and claim (again incorrectly) that breaking your Netflix user agreement was illegal, then your second was to claim it was against the rules to mention providers that allowed different destination IP’s or that didn’t keep logs.
If you’d stuck to just moderating that one post I doubt anyone would have had problem.
The issue is that engineer_comp_geek, for some reason, doesn’t like VPN’s and he’s therefore grasping at anything he can to tie them to p2p and stop discussion of them. He’s admitted that other mods would be happy for them to be discussed and he’s admitted that it was a decision made by the mod team when he raised the issue, nothing to do with the lawyers.
On preview:
VPN’s are no more of a copyright issue than which ISP you use. Both can be used for filesharing, but neither have it as their primary purpose.
Alos, as people have repeated shown in this thread, newspaper & media companies have no problems with VPN’s. All three of the ones mentioned in the previous thread have been featured, or even reccomended, on/in mainstream newspapers & tech blogs.