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08-02-2012 12:43 StarCraft 2: Unnecessary Censorship ign.com twitter.com facebook.com twitch.tv youtube.com

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Summary: A UK court has effectively ruled file-sharing site The Pirate Bay as illegal, paving the way for ISP-level blocks to be enacted when a final judgement is made in June.

Swedish file-sharing site The Pirate Bay could be blocked from the UK population after the High Court in London ruled that the site breaches copyright on a massive scale.

The move brings a block on the site to British residents one step closer.

In a judgement today, Mr. Justice Arnold who presided over the case, said that The Pirate Bay — and its users — infringe copyrighted content.

Music and film lobbying groups are now pushing for UK broadband providers to block the site. A ruling is expected in June as to whether ISPs should prevent its users from accessing the site.

In the judgement, Mr. Justice Arnold said: “the operators of [The Pirate Bay] do authorise its users’ infringing acts of copying and communication to the public. They go far beyond merely enabling or assisting.” He concluded that both the users and the operators or the site: “infringe the copyrights of the Claimants (and those they represent) in the UK”.

Considering that some 3.7 million Britons use The Pirate Bay, according to comScore, it would be a massive hit to the freedom of the Web on British soil. Alexa ranks the file-sharing site, at the time of writing, as one of the top 100 websites in the world.

While BT and Sky, along with others, continue to oppose such measures as website blocking on its networks — claiming that the cost of doing so would be passed onto the customers, and the foundation principles of the free and open Web are at risk — industry groups are having greater success in legal action.

Music and film industry representatives have recently been successful in having file-sharing site Newzbin2 blocked by major Internet service providers in the country, including Sky and BT, which has over eight million users.

The courts forced broadband provider TalkTalk, which has over four million UK customers, was forced by the courts to block access to Newzbin2 after it lost a legal battle last month. Sky and Virgin Media, who have previously implied they would only comply with court orders, received written requests from the Motion Picture Association (MPA) in November 2011.

All it takes is one legal precedence in the UK and the floodgates are open to any given site. Because The Pirate Bay has been ruled as effectively ‘illegal’, it would be unlikely that anything less than a full ISP-level block would be set.

Loz Kaye, leader of the Pirate Party UK, said: “This hearing clearly demonstrates the limitations of merely requiring judicial involvement in censorship orders.” He added: “The UK is sleepwalking into comprehensive site blocking.”

And because most of the UK online population is unaware that their online freedoms are being threatened, to say that we are “sleepwalking into censorship” is quite the case.

Image source: Flickr.

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Zack Whittaker, a criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, Canterbury, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

Disclosure Zack Whittaker

I worked briefly with Microsoft UK in 2006 but no longer have any connection with the company. Regardless, I remain impartial and unbiased in my views.

I don't hold any stock or shares, investments or industrial secrets in any company, but have signed confidentiality agreements with a number of UK and U.S. organisations, whose names I am not at liberty to disclose.

I was involved with Kent Union, the University of Kent's student union, undertaking voluntary, non-salaried, elected positions between early 2009 and mid-2010.

No other company, body, government department, non-governmental organisation or third sector organisation employs me or pays me a salary in any capacity whatsoever.

As a freelance journalist, whenever expenses are given and taken by a company that is not CBS Interactive, these will be disclosed in each relevant post to ensure transparency.

I currently work with a UK law enforcement unit. Details of which are restricted, but this is an entirely separate position which bears no connection to other work.

(Updated: 23rd October 2011)

Biography Zack Whittaker

Zack Whittaker, criminologist who studied at the University of Kent, UK, is a journalist, writer and broadcaster.

After studying criminology at university, though still in his early-20's, he has already had a series unconventional work and voluntary positions. He has worked with researchers studying neurological illnesses like Tourette's syndrome (which he suffers from), has given lectures on the nature of disabilities in the public community, and occasionally ends up speaking on television and radio discussing the events of the day.

He first had academic work published at the age of 22, then still an undergraduate, and has been cited by a wide range of publications: from the Huffington Post, Business Insider, AllThingsDigital, The Atlantic Wire and CBS News.

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Sleepwalking into censorship: Pirate Bay faces UK web block

WHO assistant director-general of health security and environment, Dr. Keiji Fukuda

Despite recommendations by the US on data censorship, the UN health body has asked scientists to publish the details of their study on a deadly flu virus strain.

After an urgent meeting between 22 elite global health experts in Geneva, the World Health Organization (WHO) urged scientists to publish their full discoveries about the lab developed H5N1 avian Flu strain.

The recommendation was issued after the US National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity (NSABB) asked scientists to censor data on their lab-made version of bird Flu.

The articles included a study by Yoshihiro Kawaoka and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the US who submitted their paper to Nature and a Dutch team led by Dr. Ron Fouchier from the Erasmus Medical Centre in Rotterdam, who wrote for Science.

NSABB said bioterrorist groups could potentially misuse the published research “for harmful purposes,” since the strain is possibly capable of spreading rapidly among humans.

Most of the UN panel members, however, believe that any theoretical risk of the virus being used by terrorists was far outweighed by the “real and present danger” of similar flu viruses in the wild.

“There is a preference from a public health perspective for full disclosure of the information in these two studies. However there are significant public concerns surrounding this research that should first be addressed,” said WHO assistant director-general of health security and environment Dr. Keiji Fukuda.

The WHO-convened panel emphasized that sharing the results among world scientists could help them identify the exact changes that might show whether a virus is developing the ability to cause a pandemic.

The group also announced that two controversial articles temporarily shelved would not be redacted and published in the near future, as originally planned. The research may be fully published at a later date instead.

SJM/TE

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WHO opposes flu study censorship

Do blood and guts belong on the front page?

What you didn’t see and should have seen

On Wednesday, the Bangkok Post carried a front page photograph of an alleged Iranian terrorist who, in a mishap, had ended up blowing both of his own legs off. It was a gruesome and bloody picture, and a controversial decision to put it on the front page. But it was the right decision.

And it reminded me of a photograph in the Singapore Straits Times that I had seen a few weeks earlier in a hotel in Shan State, Myanmar, where I was on a work assignment. Carried on an inside page, the rather startling photograph showed the body of a young man who had been found unconscious and blood-stained on the floor of an underground passageway.

His name was not given, nor was it revealed whether he survived. Indeed, there was relatively little text. The photograph was the attention-grabber.

Just a day before this, I had read in the International Herald Tribune a story about a video of the beheading of two men in Indonesia’s South Sumatra Province. The killings on the video, which was shown to a parliamentary human rights commission, were reportedly carried out by security forces hired to protect a palm oil plantation.

The reports immediately made me think of two other incidents involving photographs or videos of tragic deaths – and the question of whether they should be published or not.

The first occurred in Phnom Penh just over a year ago, when a young woman, Jessica Claire Thompson, a journalist on The Cambodia Daily, was found dead of an apparent drug overdose.

While the details surrounding the tragedy quickly became well known to other journalists, there was a tacit agreement not to publicize it in order to protect the feelings of a fellow member of the profession and of the other three journalists who were with Thompson at the time. Consequently, aside from a few brief lines, no details of Thompson’s demise, nor photographs of her corpse, were published in the English-language press in Cambodia.

Conversely, the second case, which occurred a decade ago and was far more grisly, was fully covered in a proper professional manner by the media. It involved the infamous incident, later to form the basis for a movie, when Daniel Pearl, a Wall Street Journal correspondent, was kidnapped and decapitated by terrorists in Karachi, Pakistan.

All of America’s print media and television stations reported the story in detail, because it was of great public interest. They did not hold back because it involved a member of the profession.

The Boston Phoenix newspaper even published a photograph of Pearl’s severed head – and some sensitive souls misguidedly chastised it for doing this. But the photograph appeared with an editorial defending the paper’s move and the provision of a link on its website to a video of Pearl’s execution. The Phoenix publisher said his decision to carry the picture “came from my gut, from my brain, from my heart.” He claimed it was no different to other publications running similar pictures in the past.

He referred to photographs of a dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, to an alleged Viet Cong man being shot in the head, and to a baby’s corpse being carried out of the bombed Federal Building in Oklahoma City.

Of these earlier examples, perhaps the most well-known, and still the most shocking, is that of the execution of a Viet Cong suspect in Saigon (as Ho Chi Minh City was then called). It happened on February 1, 1968, just before Tet, the Vietnamese lunar New Year. At that time, a VC offensive had split the city’s defences and reached the gates of the United States Embassy.

Eddie Adams, an Associated Press photographer, went out with a colleague to check on reports of fighting in Saigon’s Chinatown area of Cholon. They encountered some soldiers who had nabbed an alleged VC infiltrator. The man, dressed in boxers and a casual check shirt, had his arms tied behind his back.

Lt.-Col. Nguyen Loan, the police chief of South Vietnam, suddenly appeared, took out a pistol and pointed it at the man’s head.

“I had no idea he would shoot,” said Adams.

But Loan did shoot — and Adams clicked his camera. A second later, the suspect slumped to the ground, blood gushing from his head. The picture was a sensation. It horrified people around the world and galvanized the anti-war movement.

No one argued that it should not be published. In fact, it was constantly reprinted and enlarged, even appearing on placards across the country. Yet it shows a Vietnamese man being callously murdered. A man whose family, like that of Pearl, would recognize him and be distraught at the image of his violent demise.

Of course, he was seen as a yellow Asian Communist, not a white Jewish American. Pictures of Pearl’s head are unlikely to appear on placards across the US, nor are those of Jessica Thompson and her three young colleagues likely to appear on anti-drug placards in Cambodia.

The second photo mentioned by the Phoenix editors was taken on October 4, 1993, by Paul Watson, working for Canada’s Star newspaper. He was one the few journalists still in Somalia when American Marines, attempting to quell Mogadishu’s feuding warlords, got trapped in a skirmish after two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down.

The body of one American soldier killed in the firefight was later dragged around the streets by Somali gunmen. Watson took pictures of it. The soldier’s dusty, mutilated corpse is naked except for his military underpants. A local woman is prodding the body with her foot, another is poised to whack it with a sheet of tin roofing.

There was a massive outcry when this picture was published. For though the soldier was not identified, he was an all-American boy, not some skinny Vietnamese peasant.

The final picture recalled by the Phoenix newspaper was shot by Charles Porter, again of AP, on April 19, 1995.

That was when white American terrorists blew up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Porter’s photograph shows a firefighter cradling the corpse of a bloody, dirt-covered baby. It tugs the heart strings, but unlike the Vietnam and Somalia photos, it does not capture man’s inhumanity to man.

“The horror, the horror,” as Kurtz puts it, in Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.

The picture of Pearl’s head captures that horror. That is why it was right to publish it. So, too, does the bloody legless terrorist in Bangkok last week and the gruesome beheading video taken in Indonesia. And so, in a different way, does the photograph of Thompson’s body illustrate the horrors consequent upon wanton drug use by misguided youth. But let’s be brutally honest and admit that there is another consideration.

We get a vicarious pleasure from viewing such pictures. We want to see them and we watch videos and buy publications that carry them. So please don’t give me a lot of thees, thous and thems about good taste, morality and the right to privacy. It’s just hypocritical hogwash.

The Phoenix and the other papers, including the Straits Times, got their picture and ran with it. Well done. Aside from boosting their profile, they enable us to confront the horror. That we must do, if we are to keep it at bay. Otherwise, in the end, it will consume us all.

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Taste, Censorship and Morality

15-02-2012 14:25 Christopher talks about the implementation of the American police state and the threat of self-censorship. http://www.greenewave.com twitter.com

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SELF-CENSORSHIP - Video