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AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers
eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"
Once the flood gates of ISP level censorship are pushed open, it's simply going to keep cascading until our Mate's internet connection is "sanitized" to death, where sanitized is on a sliding scale depending on whoever is in power at the time.
Why can't we simply accept that this is the 21st century, and nothing should be censored? Ever. Don't want to see the content within a particular video game? Great, don't look at it. That's your right. It is also mine to masturbate to bloody, mutilated appendages if I so choose. Please replace "video game" above with any applicable form of media.
not much, just being forced to manually insert line breaks into my comment
Sounds like they have similar goals to the Australian Pirate Party. (also worth joining)
Even if that were true (which is debatable) There is the minority to consider. Just because a majority decides to throw their rights away does not make it ok to force that decision on to those who aren't ok with giving up their rights to free speech.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
The great firewall of China is the nearest anyone has got to censoring the internet, and they only just manage it by controlling all access to the internet, running everything through their filters, and having draconian penalties for trying to bypass it.... and it still does not work ....
Puteulanus fenestra mortis
One of the main differences between rich countries and poor countries is how the law is regarded by the population.
In developed countries there is a general sentiment among the people that obeying the law is something that benefits everybody. In the Third World the general sentiment is that the law is something created by those in power for their own benefit.
The way things are going, expect a major increase in corruption and violence in the currently rich contries in the next decades. You cannot keep creating law after law that go against the wishes of the majority of the people without unwanted consequences.
Which would be quite amusing, because it'd basically mean you had half the population looking for content the government doesn't want them to see.