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Philippine Cybercrime Law Put On Indefinite Hold
An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court of the Philippines has put an indefinite hold on a controversial law that would, among other things, ban cybersex and porn. A host of groups, particularly journalists, had resoundingly criticized the law, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, as broad and out of touch with how the Internet works. The Philippines' National Union of Journalists, for example, called its definition of libel 'a threat not only against the media and other communicators but anyone in the general public who has access to a computer and the Internet.'"
Cybersex IS speech, and porn is art (however far from fine art it is). When you consider how very central sexuality and control of sexuality has been to the political process across the globe, it doesn't make any sense to attempt to cast them as otherwise.
The thing about free speech is, we don't need proof it leads to a better way of life. That's a strict standard to apply to sexuality and communication. Maybe some speech (speech being expression) society does find distasteful as a whole. Is that a reason to ban it? Is that a reason to insist it isn't even expression?
If a government (or any other body) can disable sites/remove content at will for _any_ justification without due process, the same can be done for content that was not originally covered by the law. i.e.: political site, shut it down because it had porn on it. (regardless of whether or not there actually was any on the site). The problem with bans against subsets of speech is not that the actual subsets are considered to be valuable, but because the vagueness of what is considered pornographic means lawyers can just slap it on to anything.
We have 'zero proof' that building legal and technical mechanisms suitable for the suppression of a given flavor of content leads to the use of those mechanisms being used for the suppression of other flavors, sometimes including your 'actual speech' category? Srsly?
Mission creep is a well known phenomenon, and it's both easily historically observable that people's descriptions of political and social commentary they don't like frequently ends up tinged with the same vocabulary of condemnation as that used for porn('that's obscene' actually means that that includes some sordid fucking surprisingly infrequently).
On the architectural side, technical and legal mechanisms for efficient content takedowns are virtually content-agnostic. Blacklists, wordlist filters, DMCA takedown forms, any of those can be trivially re-targeted just by dropping some new parameters in to the configuration.
Lest this be dismissed as theoretical, observe the Russian experiment.
As for the babble about 'meaning' and 'the sacred', I'm just going to have to admit complete bafflement about what you are talking about.