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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.
Expect no less from the country that brought us the likes of the Fuhrer and the Governator
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
And now...Slashdot is no longer viewable to Australians.
again.
Australia's parliament voted against internet censorship in 2008 and there was a lot less organisation against it then. This close to an election many pollies are thinking of their chances of being re-elected. The Greens still hold the balance of power in parliament and they are dead against the censorship scheme, most of the independents are offside now as well, the Opposition will vote no simply because Labor is voting yes.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
http://www.pirateparty.org.au/join
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
Imagine maintaining that blacklist!
Imagine is exactly right, because the blacklist will be secret. The explanation being that having a list of RC material available will encourage people to view it... except they won't be able to...
Incidentally, for the people who think this filter is about blocking child porn, consider this: Child porn is illegal, and is the jurisdiction of the federal police. The blacklist will not be maintained by the police, and any ILLEGAL content is to be submitted to the police. The RC filter list is only for UNDESIRABLE content, content that is NOT illegal.
There's a list of what parties support the Internet Filtering Scheme(s): http://shockseat.com/communications/internet-filtering-scheme
/disclaimer, I maintain the website.
I'm recently doing a survey which will include game classification, there's no R and X classification for games. And not just internet filtering, but copyright, patent, whether they support other means to restrict content ownership and more. You can view a sample of the survey that was sent to parties here: http://shockseat.com/survey Although it's pretty amaterurish, it's already making it much easier to add more issues to my website.
Bonus: If my site takes off, I will get or at least present vague notions of what the parties plan to do so it would be up to the 'crowd' to demand clarity.
Some more information about the website here: http://shockseat.com/about
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.