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Indian Court Orders Google To Remove Content
itwbennett writes "A Court in Delhi, India has ordered Google to remove content that 'is said to mock gods worshipped in India,' according to an IDG News Service report. Mufti Ajiaz Arshad Qasmi, a private citizen, 'had filed a civil suit against Google and other Internet companies including Facebook, objecting to certain content on their websites.' While Google agreed to remove the content, citing a 'long-standing policy of responding to court orders,' other Internet companies named in the suit are likely to appeal."
A big hardy "FUCK YOU!"
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
...and my hands were on it.
"This post is an artistic work of fiction and falsehood. Only a fool would take anything posted here as fact."
Have gnu, will travel.
"No person, no idea, and no religion deserves to be illegal to insult." --RMS
Gods are rather powerful and knowing. Can't they just deal with this stuff without involving Google?
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
While they have agreed to take down the content in a civil suit, they still face criminal prosecution. In India you are criminally responsible for third party posts to your website, so Google India employees are still facing criminal charges. And agreeing to take it down has destroyed the Google employees' defense that they could not have preemptively taken it down because it is out of their control.
ASCII stupid question, get a stupid ANSI
This is India, not the US. Although I'm not familiar with the Indian government, I they don't follow the United State's First Amendment to the same degree we pretend to follow it her and in much of the West.
Although Religion may be outdated, we can thank it for many cultural and technological advances, even in modern fields such as genetics.
It all depends on the extend of the mockery here.
Let's call it "The Rise Of The State"
21st cenury marked by people rising up, overthrowing unjust tyranical regimes, meanwhile democracies pare away the rights of the people. Anyone see irony here?
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
It just makes me ask, as an atheist, can I file a suit that says all references to God mocks my opinion and have Google remove those links from every search?
(Disclaimer: Devils's Advocate [no pun intended] only. I have no problem what you do with your personal life... just keep it personal.)
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
While we're at it, why don't we thank it for the Bush administration and it's stifling of scientific progress.
You mean, by becoming the first Administration to provide federal funding for embryonic stem cell research?
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Google has to comply with the laws of the countries in which it operates. Texas is prevented by the bill of rights from passing laws that limit freedom of religion and religious commentary, so Texas could not legally issue a court order demanding that Google remove such content.
Saudi Arabia and India apparently can, though. Google's choice is to either comply with the laws of those nations or simply cease operations in those nations. Considering that no nation on earth has truly unlimited freedom of speech, let alone the US, it makes sense to make occasional court-ordered concessions by removing data accessible in those countries.
And we can thank science for WMDs, eugenics, pollution of the environment, human experimentation, and a list of other things far too long to put here.
Or maybe we can just put the blame where it belongs, which is on the people who actually do these evils and use science or religion as cover
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
This. I am a deeply religious person, and sometimes offended by the insults of unbelievers, but I will defend to the death their right to insult.
Is that you Voltaire?
"Science can amuse and fascinate us all, but it is engineering that changes the world. " - Asimov.
I am an Indian (live in the US now) and am a Hindu (by birth - I really don't care much for any religion personally) and I find your description to be biased and false. Just as Hindus in general, are laid back about most things, so too are the Muslims. I had the good fortune of studying in a Jesuit run school in a relatively poor, muslim neighborhood in Mumbai, and I had several close friends across many religions. Hindus are just as "against freedom of speech and expression" as are the Muslims. You are just deluding yourself if you think otherwise.
You need no more proof than to look at cases such as the artist M.F.Husain, who was pretty much exiled from the country by Hindu fundamentalists who were outraged that he depicted some Hindu deities in the nude.
"Or at least, barring some peaceful protest, they are at least not out to kill the heretics" - Yeah, sure, tell that to all the victims of the Gujarat riots at the hands of crazed Hindu fundamentalists (with complicity from the pro-Hindu state government).
Before George W. Bush, the federal government provided zero funding for any embryonic stem cell research. Under George W. Bush, the federal government provided funding for some embryonic stem cell research. You may not like the restrictions he placed on such federal funding, but he was the first President to provide any such funding. This source clearly lays out the timeline in the seond to last paragraph.
One of the things you will find is that a large portion of the "scientific community" exists within colleges and universities, which view anyone who believes that people are responsible for the consequences of their actions as ignorant heathens.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
Is that you Voltaire?
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Voltaire
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it. " Though these words are regularly attributed to Voltaire, they were first used by Evelyn Beatrice Hall, writing under the pseudonym of Stephen G Tallentyre in The Friends of Voltaire (1906), as a summation of Voltaire's beliefs on freedom of thought and expression.
The quotation is also a "fallacy", if used without context. Imagine there's a party saying there should be a law that will kill you and your family, will you "defend it to the death"?
Google has agreed before a court in Delhi to remove religious and other content considered objectionable, though some other Internet firms are likely to appeal the court's decision, plaintiff Mufti Ajiaz Arshad Qasmi said on Monday.
The appeal:
The government allowed the court to prosecute the Internet companies under various Indian laws in the criminal case, but Google has meanwhile appealed the decision before the Delhi High Court.
Basic background: India is the country with the second largest Muslim population in the world, number of Indian Muslims dwarfs Pakistan, Arabia, Egypt, Bangladesh. Just recently Indonesia overtook it. Muslims form a sizeable vote bank, some 15% of the electorate and almost all the politicians kow-tow the lines drawn by them. There is widespread belief that the Muslims are punching way above their weight politically. But even when there is provocation like Muslim painters paint Hindu goddesses in the nude or something, the Hindu reaction is usually divided. The secularists are mostly in control of the hard liners on the Hindu side. Once in a while you hear Hindu hardliners banning Valentines Day or protesting some movie or a book.
Having said that, for country with that large a Muslim population, very few of the Indian Muslims are involved in terrorism, or support terrorism. Despite periodical outrageous attacks by Pakistani Muslims terrorist outfits inside India, there is no widespread retaliation against the local Muslims. Indian Muslims join the police and military in large numbers.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
A party should have a right to discuss such a law; it's that discussion that's being defended, not the law itself.
Let's see. USA has had:
- Government attacks on journalists.
- Government attacks on citizens who take video recordings of police in public, often because those citizens posted to sites like Youtube the evidence of police committing abuse and brutality.
- Government shutdowns of entire websites based not on convictions under the law, but of "indictments" based on one-sided presentation of carefully chosen and misrepresented lists of evidence, complete with fabricated and delusional accusations of "mass conspiracy" spun out of whole cloth with inserted accusations of "terrorism" and other things designed not to have any factual basis but merely to constitute an emotional appeal (read: "oh but think of the children", which always comes behind some censorship law or other).
Hell, you don't even have to be that recent. The "USA PATRIOT ACT" (what an Orwellian name!) has plenty to be worried about already. And then we have the DMCA and all the other chilling effects laws the USA has enacted...
Google obeys court orders in all countries where it has a presence, it does not selectively choose. There is no Google North Korea, and their site is banned there, along with, you know, the Internet, so Google has no reason or obligation to answer to the North Korean government. Abu Dhabi is a city, not a country, but assuming you were attempting to refer to the United Arab Emirates, yes, there is a Google UAE, and Google would respond to any court order from the UAE. Note that the UAE is a fairly progressive country, and not the backwater Islamic police state that only exists in your mind. And finally, there is no Google presence in Yemen, so Google would likely ignore any court orders from there. Now that I've properly answered your questions, feel free to return to spouting "Google is teh evilz" type nonsense.
They would, probably.
I mean, they complied to requests from Cook Islands, Solomon Islands and Sri Lanka, what makes you think other nations would be different?
Stop trying to ascribe personal qualities to corporations, FFS. There's no compassion, pride, ideals and so on, there's just profits and public relations.
"Lack of spine", "principles" and "do no evil" don't even come into this, you want to do business in a country, you abide the law of that country.
FB and Google already complied to the court order, others named will probably follow right after getting some press where they'll tell how they really don't want to do that (because they didn't pay their developers to implement region-based content filtering yet)
If you're not offended, you're not living in a free society.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
This isn't a protection of God, it's a protection of those men who claim to speak for God.
Gandhi never claimed to speak for God. He didn't elevate himself to Mahatma ether. Those where things that others attributed to him just as you are attributing that he and others like him would commit murder for this offense.
If I were to draw a picture of Drew Barrymore prostituting herself out on the Vegas Strip I could easily find myself slapped with a lawsuit as well. Free speech doesn't mean freedom to commit libel and slander.
Afghanistan?
Not sure which one you're referring to, but yes, both were religious.
The Soviet-Afghan war was actually a civil war between socialist secularists and moderate-to-radical Islamists, with the first faction backed by USSR, and the second backed by Pakistan and USA. The primary reason for the war was that Islamists were offended at such horrible Soviet innovations as mixed-gender schools and universities.
The second war was against Taliban - 'nuff said.
Kosovo?
Definitely religious. Serbs are Orthodox Christian, Albanians are mostly Muslim. Kosovo itself is called "Kosovo and Metohija" in Serbian, and "Metohija" literally means "monastery lands" - because that was the historical seat of the Church in Serbia, and it's where most of its monasteries were. Then it also has Kosovo Polje, the place of the historical battle where (Christian) Serbian forces were defeated by the invading (Muslim) Ottoman army, after which Serbia was annexed into Ottoman Empire.
And yes, it also comes up in the fighting - Albanians burn down churches, and Serbs burned mosques.
Libya?
What, did you miss the jihad flag flying over Bengazi in the wake of rebel victory? Or that the country is transitioning to Sharia as its primary source of legislation?
WW1 and WW2 were religious?
You may have missed the bit in WW2 where Jews and Gypsies were being rounded up and burned in big ovens and the fact that the Nazi leader followed a mix of Christianity and pan-german mysticism and came to power partly because a group of well connected secret society/cultist types thought he was their prophesized leader. Oh, you might have missed the symbol that Nazi Germany used for its flag.
You may have also missed the bit from WW1 where Archduke Ferdinand was killed by a Serbian Orthodox Christian and that one of their chief complaints against the Austro-Hungarian empire. Then there's the whole bit with the Ottoman Empire.
Religion was not the only factor in these wars, clearly, but neither did it play no role. As for Korea and Vietnam? Did you miss the bit where the US was getting so worked up about the "godless commies" that they changed their national motto to "in god we trust". Iraq 1 was heavily based in fallout from the religious war between Iraq and Iran. In Iraq 2, the born-again Christian of the United States, who claimed to have mystical powers and to receive direct instruction from his god, referred to the war as a crusade. It was also frequently justified on the basis of the Sept 11th terrorist attacks, which had a firm basis in religion, and, when people pointed out that Iraq had nothing to do with those, the alternative reason given was that Saddam Hussein had brutally gassed Kurds to death in a religiously motivated civil war.