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December 10, 2008
Open source censorship
Anders Sandberg writes in Practical Ethics
In Open Source Censorship Sandberg describes how a judge in Australia ruled that a cartoon showing a character from The Simpsons engaged in sexual activity is child pornography. Australia is also trying to implement Internet filtering for the whole population. Meanwhile Wikipedia ended up "censored" in the UK due to a page with the controversial cover of an album.
The most interesting aspect of the Wikipedia debacle is that the decision that led to the censorship was not made by any government authority but an industry-sponsored group, the Internet Watch Foundation. The IWF maintains a blacklist certain ISPs subscribe to, and users trying to reach a site on it will be sent a blank page. Is this censorship, and is this bad?
Posted by Waldemar at December 10, 2008 03:15 PM