Censorship

[maven]

In various other threads here we have mentioned freedom of speech and civil liberties on the net but what would be the party's corporate policy on artisic censorship. I ask because the decision is in on whether a piece of fiction in which the members of Girls Aloud were depicted being tortured and killed. The PPS did not offer any evidence so a verdict of Not Guilty has been returned on the accused. A second reason for asking was a discussion with a mate about how I had had to contact T-Mobile's customer service to have them remove censorship blocks on my mobile broadband device; a restriction seemingly imposed because of German obsenity laws that T-Mobile believes they have to adhere to so their German parent company does not get sued.

As the original Girls Aloud text was published only on the net it seems to me that it has implications for our stance on online privacy. It might also be argued that the depiction of real person has implications for their privacy too. But should an author who choses to publish their work on the Internet be protected by personally privacy online? What difference is there between publishing a work of fiction such as this and the publishing of erotic photos?

It seems to me that the prime motivation for bringing the court case is that the original author is a civil servant. Perhaps intending to make an example of him. Certainly his privacy has been invaded by the media as they have freely published his name and location prior to the court's decision.

If you happen to have read the item at the heart of the case then you must agree that a guilty verdict should have return. Guilty of poor and repitious writing. But no one should be punished for that ... other than having their keyboard unplugged until they learn to write more imaginatively.

[InsaneLampshade]

I too would like to know the party's policy on artistic censorship is. For example would games such as Rapelay be fully protected by freedom of speech, where the entire purpose of the game is to rape all of the drawn 2D females?

What are the party's opinion on this, should anything written (as in the case of the girls aloud story), or drawn (such as the above game) ever be considered illegal? Or should any drawing or story always be entirely legal under freedom of speech regardless of it's content?



I'm firmly of the belief that any creative work regardless of whether people morally object to it's content or not should remain completely legal. No harm can be done to anyone with a piece of creative writing or a drawing, therefore it cannot be a crime to write or draw such material.

[Sharkz]

I too would like to know the party's policy on artistic censorship is. For example would games such as Rapelay be fully protected by freedom of speech, where the entire purpose of the game is to rape all of the drawn 2D females?

What are the party's opinion on this, should anything written (as in the case of the girls aloud story), or drawn (such as the above game) ever be considered illegal? Or should any drawing or story always be entirely legal under freedom of speech regardless of it's content?



I'm firmly of the belief that any creative work regardless of whether people morally object to it's content or not should remain completely legal. No harm can be done to anyone with a piece of creative writing or a drawing, therefore it cannot be a crime to write or draw such material.

That game sucke- looks horrible how can they make stuff like that!

To be honest as long as no ones getting really hurt i don't see the problem. I don't even care if people look at loli. I'd rather they be creepy looking at drawn girls than real ones...

[graant]

I dont think censorship should be applied to anything artistic no matter how much i may personally be disgusted by the questioned work.

At the end of the day art isnt reality, so therefore anything that has been created should not have any restrictions on it at all.


I mean the case of that girls aloud thing, if hollywood made a film that dealt with rape and torture the film studio wouldnt be taken to court would it?

[semanticist]

if hollywood made a film that dealt with rape and torture the film studio wouldnt be taken to court would it?

Not necessarily taken to court, but the film might just be banned in the UK, like 'Grotesque' was last month: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/8209829.stm

Then there was the case of the movie 'Cannibal Holocaust', where an Italian court forced the film-makers to provide proof that some of the 'murdered' actors were in fact alive and well, or face murder charges.

Movies and photographs are different from animation and written fiction, though, and I don't see any case for censoring something which can only be fiction.

[ipatrickquinn]

I dont think censorship should be applied to anything artistic no matter how much i may personally be disgusted by the questioned work.

At the end of the day art isnt reality, so therefore anything that has been created should not have any restrictions on it at all.

I mean the case of that girls aloud thing, if hollywood made a film that dealt with rape and torture the film studio wouldnt be taken to court would it?

I'm of the same viewpoint: I believe all works should be free from censorship, especially on the internet. Of course, individual websites should have sovereignty over their own space, and freedom to censor their own communications, however governments, and institutions such as the IWF should have no say on what is, or isn't, morally or socially acceptable.

One of the major issues (though I don't personally see why) seems to be the censorship of pro-Ana/Mia (anorexia and bulimia) websites, which people say would help thousands of people struggling with the condition. I may be pushing at an open door here, but surely no sane person can blame a website that someone must have purposefully searched for, or navigated to, for advice it publishes being followed. It's information - it's not forcing anyone to do anything, just giving tips, and therefore it must have had an audience first (i.e. the setting up of these websites didn't start the problem).

A great many censorship issues were raised and discussed on Wikipedia during the IWF's block of the Virgin Killer article - well worth a read from a lot of well-informed people with first-hand experience of internet censorship.

[Duke]

One of the major issues (though I don't personally see why) seems to be the censorship of pro-Ana/Mia (anorexia and bulimia) websites, which people say would help thousands of people struggling with the condition. I may be pushing at an open door here, but surely no sane person can blame a website that someone must have purposefully searched for, or navigated to, for advice it publishes being followed. It's information - it's not forcing anyone to do anything, just giving tips, and therefore it must have had an audience first (i.e. the setting up of these websites didn't start the problem).

This reminds me of a recent call that was made for greater restrictions on the internet after a "test subject" (I think a child of a particular official who was kicking up the fuss about this) was found to have been able to access "adult content" - by actively looking for it. Somehow this was the fault of the websites or the internet in general. In my experience, it is essentially impossible to successfully censor something without taking extreme measures - arguably education is a better approach - and probably a safer one.

There was also a complaint about how easy it is to bypass "age verification" things on sites and that somehow it was again the fault of the website for the child lying.

[jez9999]

duke, there are quite a few people in this country who believe that adults should not be able to see stuff that might be 'inappropriate' for them, let alone children. They do not believe humans are capable of or inclined to use intelligence to avoid being scarred for life by such materials. It therefore comes as no surprise to me that people want to ban all sorts of websites. This is the kind of illiberal stuff that we need to oppose fiercely.

[borgs8472]

Just to weigh in, I feel the internet in particualar has a lot of dodgy content on it, much of which not even I would like to see (ogrish anyone?). I do believe in the future the goverment will play more an active roll in CLASSIFYING content so that people can better control their browsing experience. Any censorship should be open and transparent, e.g .'this site has been blocked due to [lawsuit - link'], or 'this site has been blocked due to [terrorism content - link]', and not the current situation where people get DNS errors, and fake 404s.

The government's understand and handling of the internet is not yet mature enough that I would trust them with any much content classification, thus I side with the majority of pirates here in being broadly anti-censorship.

[scuzzmonkey]

content classification

HTML5 has this function built in.

frankly, whoever made that decision is beyond idiotic.

[M2Ys4U]

and the W3C has had PICS for years but it died a very slow, painful death of non-adoption.

[samgower]

duke, there are quite a few people in this country who believe that adults should not be able to see stuff that might be 'inappropriate' for them, let alone children. They do not believe humans are capable of or inclined to use intelligence to avoid being scarred for life by such materials. It therefore comes as no surprise to me that people want to ban all sorts of websites. This is the kind of illiberal stuff that we need to oppose fiercely.

The traditional liberal view would be to censor a minimal amount of material that is objectionable to all or the vast majority, and provide warning in cases where material may be or is probably objectionable.

Just to weigh in, I feel the internet in particualar has a lot of dodgy content on it, much of which not even I would like to see (ogrish anyone?). I do believe in the future the goverment will play more an active roll in CLASSIFYING content so that people can better control their browsing experience. Any censorship should be open and transparent, e.g .'this site has been blocked due to [lawsuit - link'], or 'this site has been blocked due to [terrorism content - link]', and not the current situation where people get DNS errors, and fake 404s.

I completely agree. Case in point, I followed the link that ipatrickquinn posted, but I didn't know about the 'Virgin Killer' cover, and the page at the end of the link didn't immediately make it clear what it was all about, so I went to the article itself and was ultimately presented with something that I do object to and would have rather not seen. I definitely would not have objected to my ISP redirecting me to tell me what was on that page before giving me the option to either remove the warning or keep it.

[AndrewTindall]

duke, there are quite a few people in this country who believe that adults should not be able to see stuff that might be 'inappropriate' for them, let alone children. They do not believe humans are capable of or inclined to use intelligence to avoid being scarred for life by such materials. It therefore comes as no surprise to me that people want to ban all sorts of websites. This is the kind of illiberal stuff that we need to oppose fiercely.

The traditional liberal view would be to censor a minimal amount of material that is objectionable to all or the vast majority, and provide warning in cases where material may be or is probably objectionable.

Just to weigh in, I feel the internet in particualar has a lot of dodgy content on it, much of which not even I would like to see (ogrish anyone?). I do believe in the future the goverment will play more an active roll in CLASSIFYING content so that people can better control their browsing experience. Any censorship should be open and transparent, e.g .'this site has been blocked due to [lawsuit - link'], or 'this site has been blocked due to [terrorism content - link]', and not the current situation where people get DNS errors, and fake 404s.

I completely agree. Case in point, I followed the link that ipatrickquinn posted, but I didn't know about the 'Virgin Killer' cover, and the page at the end of the link didn't immediately make it clear what it was all about, so I went to the article itself and was ultimately presented with something that I do object to and would have rather not seen. I definitely would not have objected to my ISP redirecting me to tell me what was on that page before giving me the option to either remove the warning or keep it.

but just because you object to something that was entirely legal does not mean ISPs should redirect away from it, optionally or otherwise.

[samgower]

but just because you object to something that was entirely legal does not mean ISPs should redirect away from it, optionally or otherwise.

With film, there is classification available to give people the choice of whether to watch it. I'm not talking about age limits, but the stuff by the side of it: 'contains violence/sex/strong language/etc'. If someone objects to any of those, they can choose not to watch it. Similarly, there should be a choice about potentially objectionable material on the web. I'm not saying anyone should stop anyone else from accessing material that's not illegal, that is unacceptable, but there should be a way by which people can be made aware of the content of the material.

This is a principle of liberty: nobody should be stopped from causing harm to themselves, but all effort should be made to ensure that they know their actions could harm them.

[scuzzmonkey]

check the documentation on html 5 - they have built this in.

[samgower]

check the documentation on html 5 - they have built this in.

Does that not rely on the website's creator to classify it? Wikipedia could do this, but there are plenty of sites that simply wouldn't. Ordinarily I'd be all for a decentralised, voluntary solution, but this issue doesn't lend itself to it.

[scuzzmonkey]

well yes ofc - but the flipside is creating an organisation such as the BBFC for the internet - which is simply impossible.

[AndrewTindall]

it's quite probable that a crowd-sourced content classification system using HTML5 could be done soon. the only problem would be IE and mobile browsers.

[scuzzmonkey]

and that might work for maybe 10% of the surface web - the other 90%....and the entirety of the darknet (another 4-500%) would be left alone.

so again, its ultimately pointless.

[gareth]

Obscenity laws are bullshit. This is the 21st century, can we stop being so afraid now? There is no god to be afraid of. Ignorance is not a virtue.

The classic definition of criminal obscenity is if it "tends to deprave and corrupt," stated in 1868 by John Duke Coleridge, 1st Baron Coleridge.