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Brazilian Judge Orders 24-hour Shutdown of Google and Youtube
_Sharp'r_ writes "Judge Flavio Peren of Mato Grosso do Sul state in Brazil has ordered the arrest of the President of Google Brazil, as well as the 24-hour shutdown of Google and Youtube for not removing videos attacking a mayoral candidate. Google is appealing, but has recently also faced ordered fines of $500K/day in Parana and the ordered arrest of another executive in Paraiba in similar cases."
Early reports indicated that the judge also ordered the arrest of the Google Brazil President, but the story when this was written is that the police haven't received any such order (and an earlier such order was overuled recently). The video is in violation of their pre-election laws.
Note that in this case it's about good censorship. Most countries on earth have these kind of pre-election rules to combat PR attack on the last hours of elections. Most sane countries have these laws. Since it's just 24 hours, it really just seems to ban it right before elections and is not some penalty on Google or Youtube. Google is intentionally breaking laws here and should be punished.
case in point pornography is recognized as to be limited to certain class of ages, and various type of media are limited by ages. Also you can't yell fire in theater, another good type of censorship and similar. Finally libel laws are certainly limitation and therefor censorship of some type of speech, and in some country if you swear and insult a policeman you can get fined. In such a case , the censorship is to make sure *everybody* is on the same level shortly before the election, without a media blitz. Such law exists actually in many country. So yeah your insinuation that there is no good censorship is noted but completely ridiculous.
C. Sagan : A demon haunted world:
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Nope. This is (yet again) about a US company trying to pretend that only US law applies as soon as they enter another country. Google is just the most visible example of that, and I support this decision.
If you want to sell services in a country and generate revenue, you damn well have to follow the local laws there or get fined. Simple.
Insert
President Google, a browser in Brazil is caching
SHUT
DOWN
EVERYTHING!
I'm sure all the people who want/need to use google / youtube on a daily basis are going to be so happy with this ruling.
I hate trotting out this quote every so often, but...
"As the Americans learned so painfully in Earth's final century, free flow of information is the only safeguard against tyranny. The once-chained people whose leaders at last lose their grip on information flow will soon burst with freedom and vitality, but the free nation gradually constricting its grip on public discourse has begun its rapid slide into despotism. Beware of he who would deny you access to information, for in his heart he dreams himself your master."
Commissioner Pravin Lal
"U.N. Declaration of Rights"
From Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri.
"We are the music makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams [...]."
Good job, Brazil: If they don't listen to the law, give them a fine high enough that it's relevant, and arrest the responsible people.
I'm not choosing sides whether this is good or bad censorship. I'm just delighted that they have the balls to stand up to large companies. Not every country does that... and in almost every case the responsible management get away with it without any punishment. Most punishments are fines, which will just slightly reduce profit. Arresting the management might get their attention.
Brazilian GNP - as sourced by Google.
From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."
"case in point pornography is recognized as to be limited to certain class of ages, and various type of media are limited by ages"
That doesn't mean any of this is actually good though. It's such a controversal subject that no one's really got the balls to study it, but those that have have suggested that just as controlled provision of drugs to addicts is a better way to ween them off it than simply trying to ban the substance outright, that working with paedophiles and controlling their access to this sort of information, and similarly allowing kids access to age restricted content are better than prohibition.
What is actually a better idea is spending those resources that are otherwise spent enforcing this sort of thing going after those producing the content in the first place - i.e. actually catching cold hard child abusers and those who fuel the industry by profiting off of it rather than those who simply consume it. Spending those resources actually protecting children is a far superior option to wasting money censoring it with no demonstrable positive effect despite much money being spent lobbying that there is. As there's no evidence that viewing content does actually make you more likely to commit a crime based on said content, what do you think is better? Allowing those people to view that content free on the internet, or forcing them underground where they actually have to give money to people who profit off said content and hence driving the production of said content causing real actual harm to the people who suffer from it?
It's the same with copyright, the music industry claims that downloading MP3s funds terrorism and organised crime but that's exactly backwards - preventing people downloading MP3s means they'll just buy their music cheap from dodgy backstreet dealers where the money genuinely does go to organised crime and terrorism.
Your argument is based on the assumption that laws we have are exactly right, and are the best and only way to deal with some of societies issues, but that assumption seems almost certainly likely to be false.
I'm not against encouraging people not be stupid - i.e. shouting fire in a crowded theatre by fining/jailing them, but that's not censorship. They're allowed to do it, they're just encouraged not to by ensuring there are consequences and there IS a subtle difference between outright censorship, and nudging people towards censoring themselves whatever people say.
One of the few countries where you can be arrested for doing a joke that is not funny ... in a comedy show ...
Freedom of speech is not on our dictionaries and we don't fight for it .. ever
Greetings to the parallel world, stranger! Almost all technological, economic and social indexes have improved since the 90s in Brazil. The country improving dramatically, despite the left versus right babbling.
regardless of your personal opinion of a law, if you ( individually or as a corporate entity) choose to ignore that law then you accept that you may suffer the consequences. If you are making a moral stand that you beleive the law is wrong and therefore ignore it, you have no-one but yourself to blame when the law enforcement organisations or judiciary punish you in line with that. There are many laws I disagree with as an example for me as a european, Allowing people to vote before they are legally allowed to drink is assinine. However If i choose to supply alcohol to an adult under the age of 21 in teh us I have no-one but myself to blame if I end up in a shower block bending over for Bubba. Hell one of the fonding priciples of America is supposedly no taxation without representation, try cliaming that as a defence as non-us citizen working in the us for not paying tax, and see hwo quickly you lose your case for tax evasion. Regardless of your opinion of the political system of a country, the Law in a democracy ( brazil is a democracy) is the will of the people ( maybe at a slight remove due to the way representative democarcies work) and if you chose to ignore it you run the risk of puniashment.
No wonder why Brazilians get offended when one points out the degree of corruption in that country; a true banana republic.
HA HA Look at the third world shitholes struggle with lack of free speech! You are never going to get off your tiny island if you keep it up!
Google should just shut off their entire net-block forever. Let them rot in the dark without information.
So there's this election law from the past. But what if someone uses email and DailyMotion to spread last hour propaganda? Shutting down individual sites is silly. Brazil should cut off the Internet or change the law instead.
Pornography. I'm still not so sure pornography is bad.
We like to watch entertainment of the things we like or are interested in. We watch food shows. No one has a problem with that. We watch beauty contests. No one... okay, 'few' have a problem with that. Olympics? Fishing? Golf? Fighting!! You name it; if someone likes it, there's a form of entertainment which will be produced about it. But because it involves sex, a rather basic and extremely universal pleasure in the animal world, we have to say "oh no..."
What we fear, dislike or disapprove of about sex has more to do with religious and social values than anything else. Remove those from the equation and you will see less "forbidden fruit." Suddenly people aren't making unsubstantiated claims like "it harms children!" You know what harms children? Curiosity which isn't managed by adults. Knives, fire, fireworks, guns, heights, roads and streets... sex isn't quite as dangerous as any of those other things and yet somehow we are more concerned over whether or not they know what their 'things' are for than just about anything else.
"case in point pornography is recognized as to be limited to certain class of ages, and various type of media are limited by ages"
That doesn't mean any of this is actually good though.
It's actually wrong, too. We have pornography for 12 year old girls. Go to your local Barnes & Noble and you will find books like Twilight and Fifty Shades of Sucking Huge Werewolf Dong.
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Unless you have a time machine to bring you back to 1947 you cannot switch "worlds".
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
IAL (in Brazil) and I work in a Brazilian public prosecutor’s office.
First of all, it is important to notice that Brazilian judges are not regular government employees and are not elected. They take rigorous exams to get the job and, after two years, are judges for life, so they should not feel pressured to please influent people, politicians or corporations to keep their jobs. There are exceptions, like everywhere else, but Brazilian magistrates are usually very intelligent, rational and impartial.
Having said that, I think some of these rulings are excessive and were made by judges that, like a few American judges, don't understand how user generated content sites work.
But there is also the possibility that some of these videos contain false information or offensive personal attacks against candidates that can influence the outcome of an election. The judges analyzed these videos and considered them illegal. They ordered Google to take down the videos, but Google ignored the court order.
Google is not liable for the video itself, Google and its executives are responsible for not complying with court orders. In Brazil, willingly ignoring a court order is a crime, but arrest orders in cases like these are only used as a coercive measure. They want Google to takedown the videos, not punish Google.
Using the "fire in a crowded theater" analogy, I think these cases are more like someone asking the owner of a theater to play the sound of someone shouting fire in multiple events, a judge ordering the owner to stop playing that sound or at least warn the audience in advance, and the owner of the theater ignoring the order, even after being fined. What could be done? Shutting the theater down (shutdown of Youtube) or threatening arresting its owner (Google executive)? Then the court order would probably be respected.
Anyway, I worked in a case against Google Brazil a few months ago (an offensive video against a minor - bullying), and they complied with the court order right away. Maybe there is something special in these cases.
Sorry for my poor English.
Nope. This is (yet again) about a US company trying to pretend that only US law applies as soon as they enter another country.
I don't think so.
I think this is Google arguing that Google shouldn't be responsible for policing what people choose to post on their service. Instead, Google appears to believe that the person who posted the video in violation of the law should be held accountable -- and that's not an unreasonable position, particularly since the question goes far beyond just this case, or election laws, or even YouTube.
My perception is that Google is quite rational about these things, and does abide by local laws. In fact, Google specifically is very careful in general to abide by legal takedown requests. If they're willing to brave the court's wrath, it must be because they see tremendous value in establishing the precedent that users are responsible for what they post.
(Disclaimer: I work for Google. I do not, however, speak for Google, and Google doesn't speak for me. Also, I have no insider knowledge about this issue.)
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
That argument it stupid.
The point is that some kinds of speech can incite panic and if done for nefarious purposes should be legally limited because the benefit of such a limit outweighs the harm.
Claiming that the people who panicked would be at fault is ridiculous: suppose someone yelled "Sarin!" in a room full of biochemists... They would be RIGHT in assuming they were in immediate mortal danger.
What's the BENEFIT from protecting such speech?
Oh, so your inability to understand the laws is then an excuse to simply ignore them?
Actually, here in Brazil people ignoring a law is usually reason enough for it to start being ignored by law agents too. This is so common we've even developed a language expression for these cases: "The law on 'x' hasn't caught." In fact, in cases were the government is really adamant about getting people to start following a certain rule, they go about approving a similar law a few more times over a wide time span, so that one can say something to the effect of "the law on 'x' finally caught on the fourth attempt, 6 years after the previous one and 43 years after the first". And then it sometimes also happens that a law goes out of fashion for a few decades, then "caughts" again, etc.
So, anyone, business owner or not, has a fair chance of having his ignoring of a law he thinks dumb validated if enough other people follow suit. Sure, he might be unlucky enough to be chosen as an example by the government when it's trying to make the law to catch. But most often than not it won't.
There's one exception to this though: tax law. When it comes to getting money, almost nothing, not even street riots, will cause the government step back. Those are almost the only laws that "catch" no matter what.
Also, in regards to the OP's mention of Brazilian laws clusterfuckery nature, I'll give you one example. There are two main taxes on manufactured goods here, a Federal and a State ones. The mix and match of laws has made it so that you must pay the State one over the sum of the good's price plus the Federal one, *and* you must pay the Federal one over the sum of the good's price plus the State one. Yes, they iterate recursively, so that to find what you actually owe in Federal and State taxes for the good you're selling you have to apply a "lim 0->inf" over the thing. Try to explain *that* to an illiterate baker...
Conservatism: (n.) love of the existing evils. Liberalism: (n.) desire to substitute new evils for the existing ones.
Brazil’s electoral law has several restrictions on what opponents or critics can air on television and radio about candidates for office — even comedic needling of politicians is banned during electoral season. The Internet’s role in these cases, until now, was not legally explored, as the government does not license the internet and was considered by most exempt from the law.
I guess living in Europe since 2005 made you forget how things are here. Or are you just one of the government's astortufers? (Yeah, that's exactly the government's line: "It is the developped countries that are keepeing us poor! Really! Don't look at your own government!")
Rethinking email
We are following Venezuela's example. The US is in a different path. Both paths lead to poverty and tirany, that's right, but they are different.
Rethinking email
I think that might be because your wife doesn't excite you. Consider boys or animals. Seriously. Be honest with yourself about what excites you.
I have the opposite experience, personally... When my wife makes herself available to me in a pleasant way, things go pretty well... way better.
All of the things you have mentioned are not censorship, but speech and visual actions which result in consequences. This is not the same as censorship, as you would have to have already put that material out into the world to be deemed in violation. This implies censorship has failed to prevent the dissemination of this material, game over.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
You can yell fire in a theatre, and there is nothing illegal about the speech itself. However, you would be charged with reckless endangerment, or if someone were trampled, manslaughter. Censoring the speech is bad because you cannot know the context before hand. All you can do is base law on actions, not words.
The point is that some kinds of speech can incite panic...
You're implying that a specific reaction to speech is entirely involuntary, and that everybody will react in the same way.
What's the BENEFIT from protecting such speech?
Because it's a RIGHT that must be vigorously defended. Speech is harmless. Arrest the listener if he reacts inappropriately.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
Panic is not something that should be encouraged. It should be managed. Otherwise you'll have 12 biochemist fighting to the death over a breathing apparatus. And it turns that the terrorists was yelling "Sharron" not "sarin"...
Have you considered maybe taking up drinking?
I mean, have a couple...loosen up man....or at least maybe try stuff, role playing...whatever got you off in pr0n....see if she'll act out with you or something.
You might have to get HER to have a few drinks first too tho....if it is really weird.
Light travels faster than sound. This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.........
We are following Venezuela's example. The US is in a different path. Both paths lead to poverty and tirany, that's right, but they are different.
The path for the US may be different, but the ultimate destination is nearly identical. Here in the US, they know it will take collapsing the economy and creating widespread social collapse, food shortages, and chaos before US citizens will cry out for and accept a strongman to save them from the anarchy, starvation, and chaos.
The end will be the same. Tyranny and despotism, possibly a semi-fascist/socialist/communist mashup in the US with some of the worst features of each. I just hope that in the desperate months and years ahead, US citizens resist the siren-call of the "quick fixes" in exchange for "temporary control" that will be offered by those wanting to use the opportunity to permanently seize total power. Never let a serious crisis go to waste.
Strat
Progressivism (aka US 'Liberalism'): Ideas so good they need a police/surveillance-state to enforce.
So, people don't watch Google in thin air. Didn't an ISP provide the video. Why arbitrarily go after Google and not the service provider. Before someone states that laws in Brazil (such as the US) protect the ISP, I would say the law is then arbitrary.
And I'll add in some of my experience which actually circles back somewhat to the original topic.
My wife is Brazilian (see!)...I am in my mid 40s...I and my wife have been watching porn for as long as I could get hard (back then was in printed magazines). We both watch each alone and together as well.
And guess what? We still have great sex, I have no problem ejaculating, fast if I want to...or taking longer if she wants a longer experience. And after these years, we are still very active...worse weeks are twice...average is 3-4 times. And I can still go double within an hour...and do occasionally just to verify that I can still do it!
I have to admit, I do have the perfect wife! Actually I suggest to most north american should marry a brazilian woman instead of the boring women in N.A....but that's another topic altogether!
So, I dont believe porn is a reason to not be able to sexually active with a partner.
Good health and mental state are key. Your story suggests you would have a good future in the porn industry. Look into it. Lots of money in it for men who can perform... turns out, women can fake anything but men can fake nothing.
You teach children to use the tools necessary for life. Knives, cars and all... you don't hide any of these things from children and act like they don't exist "until they are old enough." You see things from a particular perspective without realizing you're actually applying a moral standard which is not quite universal. Why treat one like it's bad/evil and the other like it simply needs to be handled carefully and with respect?
You can't have my address, but on the off-chance you manage to dig it up yourself, feel free to tell anyone you want anything you wish to about me, true or not. I stand by my position.
...I guess they'll have to resort to that completely ineffective method of "talking" to spread garbage or convincing arguments.
That could never work. :)
</sarcasm>
I agree. But that doesn't affect the point: such speech is harmful to the personal liberty of the people in he movie theater, and has no benefit - and as such deserves no protection. Such protection would be harmful.
People DO have involuntary reactions to speech.
And my point stands unaffected if some people react differently. Deaf people would be one example - although it'd be hard to claim that they would be unaffected by everyone else panicking.
Speech is NOT always harmless. You can cause physical harm to someone with speech alone. Long term increases in stress hormones can cause physical damage to the body. Not to mention emotional harm.
Causing panic is just one example. Panic is generally triggered by the amygdala which triggers the adrenal gland. This happens without conscious involvement. It can be suppressed to a degree in some people, but that doesn't mean it isn't involuntary.
Then, instead of censoring speech, train people to react appropriately instead of the usual 'us vs them' mentality that is pushed now. That's what being human with a free will is about. Most of the violent reaction to speech is a learned reaction anyway. Or conversely, we can admit we're not quite 'human'. But then we have no real way of ensuring that we pick the best to rule over us. So, we still live with 'might makes right'.
Either way, Brazil can fuck off, just like the muslim rioters. If they can't control themselves, then they should learn how. We shouldn't hesitate to fight back and teach them in no uncertain terms that the freedom to offend is sacrosanct.
“He’s not deformed, he’s just drunk!”
If you're Google and have to deal with BS like this, take it a step further and just shut off access to all google services in Brazil until the government gives in. All those politicians have to go home and listen to their kids whine about how they can't watch honey boo boo on youtube, I give it a day until Brazil backs down.