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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 12 Jun 2009France's highest court has inflicted an embarrassing blow to President Sarkozy by cutting the heart out of a law that was supposed to put France in the forefront of the fight against piracy on the internet. The Constitutional Council declared access to the internet to be a basic human right, directly opposing the key points of Mr Sarkozy's law, passed in April, which created the first internet police agency in the democratic world. The strongly-worded decision means that Mr Sarkozy's scheme has backfired and inadvertently boosted those who defend the free-for-all culture of the web.0 comment(s)
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 12 Jun 2009Republican Senator Orrin Hatch spoke Tuesday at the World Copyright Summit in Washington DC and hailed the Pirate Bay guilty verdict as an important victory. He expressed severe disappointment in Canada for showing up on our watch list for piracy next to China and Russia
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 12 Jun 2009China's tough stance on Web censorship and promoting its own technologies has put it at odds with Western technology firms on several occasions in recent years. The latest of those has pitted PC makers against a government that says it's intent on keeping pornography out of the hands of China's youth, though many believe the move could involve censorship and invasion of privacy. Google, Yahoo and Intel have all faced similar past issues in one of the world's fastest growing, but also most highly censored, markets.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 11 Jun 2009Internet users in the UAE reported the fifth highest rate of website censorship out of nearly 200 countries, according to a new project mapping global online restrictions at home and in the workplace. The statistics showed that 382 different web pages were flagged as “inaccessible” by UAE users who reported to the Herdict Web project, developed through Harvard University’s Berkman Center for Internet & Society.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 11 Jun 2009On May 14th a protest [pt] against the Digital Crimes Bill proposed by Senator Azeredo to typify crimes on the Internet took place in São Paulo to promote debate. On May 25th, it was time for a demonstration in Porto Alegre. On June 1st, a similar protest happened in Minas Gerais and a new one is being planned now in Rio de Janeiro. These protests have been called “Against the Digital AI-5” after the Brazilian dictatorship's Institutional Act Number Five or “AI-5“, the fifth, and considered the most cruel, of seventeen decrees issued by the military dictatorship in the years following the 1964 coup d'état in Brazil. Issued in 1968, AI-5 abolished freedom of expression by introducing the preliminary censorship of music, films, theater and television. Any work considered subversive to the political and moral values of the country was censored and artists jailed. AI-5 marked the transition to the toughest period of human rights violations in Brazilian history.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 11 Jun 2009Hardly a week goes by without Iran being featured prominently in the news. Usually the news is about the country’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s inflammatory rhetoric or its nascent nuclear program. But Iran is not the monolithic entity it is often portrayed to be in Western, and especially U.S., media. While the Iranian government retains a monopoly on all television and radio broadcasting, the country continues to have an independent, though reduced in size and severely battered, print media. Although many independent and reformist newspapers were launched during the years of the Khatami presidency (1997-2005), hardliners in Iran have shut down more than 100 of those publications and jailed dozens of journalists in the process. It is perhaps no surprise then that during those years Iranians began taking to the Internet in droves. Between 20 and 25 million Iranians have regular digital access, giving the country the highest Internet penetration rate in the region. According to research by the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, the Iranian blogosphere currently boasts some 60,000 regularly updated blogs of virtually every political stripe. Others estimate that the number is closer to 100,000. Even Iran’s president and supreme leader maintain blogs. “Weblogistan,” as Iranians casually refer to the teeming and diverse world of Farsi blogging, is alive and well despite a seemingly endless barrage of legal (and at times extralegal) persecutions.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 10 Jun 2009The French Constitutional Council has ripped into the new Création et Internet law which would disconnect repeat online copyright infringers, calling the basic premise unconstitutional. "Innocent until proven guilty" remains a central principle of French law, and it cannot be bypassed simply by creating a new nonjudicial authority. Better known as the "three strikes" law, Création et Internet set up a High Authority in France that would oversee a graduated response program designed to curb online piracy. Rightsholders would investigate, submit complaints to the High Authority (called HADOPI, after its French acronym), and the Authority would take action. Warnings would be passed to ISPs, who would forward them to customers; after two such warnings, the subscriber could be disconnected and placed on a nationwide "no Internet" blacklist.
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 10 Jun 2009Chinese information activists have been testing and collecting information about the government sponsored filter software, “Green Dam Youth Escort” via blog posts, twitter (search #greendam) and collaborative platforms since the WSJ's news about Beijing government required PC makers to install filter software for all the PCs shipped to China from July 1 2009 onward popped up. Some of them collectively put together a technical analysis of the software at google document and the result shows that the filter is full of flaws: "Current versions only support Windows; effective only when used in conjunction with Internet Explorer or Google Chrome, it has no effect when used with Firefox. The harmful information screened by the software includes politically-related harmful information, and the software relies on non-conventional methods to install, also ineffective within Firefox, closing the browser and adding the website address onto a banned list without confirmation. In Internet Explorer, the software's ability to classify clearly political content as 'harmful information' is unreliable; for pornographic content, Green Dam is able to make relatively accurate assessments. When used with Firefox, however, the software shows no response."
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 10 Jun 2009Tight behavior codes are nothing new on the campuses of religious colleges. The venerable Moody Bible Institute in Chicago, for instance, asks (PDF) that students living on campus not attend "rock concerts," "alternative concerts," or "secular concerts," not attend comedy clubs, and not work on Sunday—but only before 6pm. As for Internet restrictions, they are ubiquitous and usually designed to keep students from easily accessing pornography while on campus. Few schools go as far as Brigham Young, though, which even blocks YouTube out of a desire to help its students live a "chaste and virtuous life." But the YouTube ban might be coming to an end. In early 2007, a school spokesperson explained the ban to the Associated Press. "We use the filtering process for two reasons," said BYU spokeswoman Carri Jenkins at the time. "First, to protect students from inappropriate material. The other is because of our limited bandwidth. That bandwidth is used for academic purposes."
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By: Rebekah HeacockDate: 10 Jun 2009One could argue that American corporations like Dell and Hewlett Packard will be abetting censorship if they acquiesce to China's recent demand that all personal computers sold in that country be equipped with software that allows government officials to block access to websites that disseminate "unhealthy information." Some critics have presented the issue as a straightforward choice between corporate "profits" and enlightened "principle" (profit, predictably, being the immoral choice). Which is technically true. But what if profit is the constructive way to advance our principles? The 40 million personal computers sold in China last year — many of them in the hands of once-isolated people — will do more to liberalize that nation than any government sanction or well-intentioned protest we could concoct. When, after all, has any policy of isolation or trade restriction helped spread democracy or undermine tyranny?
