Testing ISP Censorship

ryants writes "As part of a research project, Christian Ahlert ran an interesting experiment. He posted John Stuart Mill's On Liberty, which is clearly in the public domain, on different ISPs. He then sent the ISPs phony copyright violation notices. The results are troubling, with ISPs "acting as judge, jury and private investigator at the same time.""

Comments

ISP's personal views

[nurb432]

I wonder how much censorship ( loosly using the word, as only a government can censor, by definition ) is taking place due to an ISP's personal views.

Such as a Jew owned ISP filtering out blatant Nazi sites.. but not mentioning it to their customers...

Sure it is their right, but its also the right of the consumers to go elswhere. They should be legally obligated to notify customers of the filtering.

Re:Sample Size? Two.

[M. Silver]

If I owned an ISP and someone reported that there was a problem with copyrighted material on my equipment, I would take the stuff down too.

I have to agree, and I would hope any ISP would do the same. Err on the side of caution, and all. Were I a copyright holder trying to stop my stuff from being scattered hither and yon, I'd be railing to Slashdot if I couldn't get ISPs to cooperate.

Both that and things like the GPL rest on the same principle: copyright holders should be able to control the use of their work. With the GPL, you want to use that control to make it stay freely (speech) available, but that's still control.

Some Slashdotters want to have their cake and eat it, too... copyright control is okay when it means they get stuff free, not okay when it means they can't get stuff free. Waah, waah, waah.

I think the potential harm from having something temporarily taken offline inappropriately is far less than the potential harm from having something left online inappropriately.