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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.
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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
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.
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.
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.