Australian Internet Censorship Fails

Codeine writes ""Technically it would appear they have complied with the law, in that it is not hosted here," Nugent said. "But to the end-user, it would appear that nothing has changed." And this is being described as a success by a government spokesperson. Check it out. "

Comments

Re:Solutions

[Paul Johnson]

4)We need to get the ISPs to offer "offshore inshurance," i.e. the ISP is not allowed to shutdown your site, but they are allowed to move it offshore. Ideally, they should upload the content to the offshore site at the first sign of censorship.

Probably won't work, at least not in that form. A UK court recently convicted a man under the Obscene Publications Act for a pr0n site which he created in the UK and then uploaded to servers in the US. The legal theory was that the act of publication occured in the UK because the upload and some downloads were both in the UK, and the physical location of the server was therefore irrelevant. I suspect that judges in other juristictions are going to think in similar ways.

Having said that, for free information the mirror reflex seems to work rather well. As soon as there is a threat of censorship hundreds of people in lots of juristictions grab copies and mirror it. DeCSS has gone this way, and other information will do so. So while it would be nice for anyone anywhere to own a pr0n site, the truth will still be out there mirrored on somebodies server.

Paul.

Solutions

[Weezul]

"It's easy for commercial sites to relocate, but the average community site can't do that," Mr Yee said. "It is the Web sites of ordinary Australians that will be affected."

We need to develop a good system for individuals to host sites overseas. There are several ideas:

1) free hosting services. Unfortunatly, many of these censor content too, so we should publish information on how to keep your site active via these services.

2) We need to set up a network of people who will volunter to host censored content as an act of civil disobediance. We need to be more organized about miroring censored content and we need people who don't mind hosting things that need CGI and stuff.

4) We need to get the ISPs to offer "offshore inshurance," i.e. the ISP is not allowed to shutdown your site, but they are allowed to move it offshore. Ideally, they should upload the content to the offshore site at the first sign of censorship. The offshore site would activate the page if there was any problem with the main site.. and would not even remove it by the authors request; thus making it resistant to court orders. ISPs in many countries could band together to offer this offshore inshurance; thus keeping costs negligable and protecting from orginisations with a multinational presence (like the MPAA).

Jeff