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Techdirt has written a few times about Turkey's difficult
relationship with new technology. Unfortunately, it looks like that
now includes Twitter, as two troubling decisions against users have been
handed down recently. Here's the first, as reported by the Turkish Web
site Hürriyet Daily News:
On
Techdirt.
A couple of weeks ago I wrote
about how the irony-immune IT department of the European Parliament was
censoring emails complaining about censorship. Now it seems they have a
kindred spirit here in the UK:
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It began last week, with an article by the Pirate Party MEP Christian Engström, who wrote about a vote that will take place in the European Parliament (possibly tomorrow):
On
Open Enterprise blog.
Long-time readers will remember the appalling way in which the UK's
Digital Economy Act was brought in - with no research, no debate, and
no democracy. At its heart lies the infamous "three strikes" idea: if
you are alleged - not proved, but merely alleged - to have shared files
online on three occasions you will be subject to some punishment.
Originally that was cutting off your hand, er, your Internet connection,
but as the discussions over implementing this unjust and punitive law
have dragged on, it's become less clear how it will actually work.
On
Open Enterprise blog.
It's hardly a surprise these days that Chinese Internet companies
routinely self-censor what appears on their services: the world knows
there's not much it can do about what happens within China's borders.
But here's a disturbing story about how that censorship has started spreading further afield.
On
Techdirt.
Smartphones have some big advantages: they offer considerable
computing power in a highly-portable form, and are available at prices
that allow a broad spectrum of users to get online easily. But as we reported
last year, there's a big downside, too, one that's all-the-more
dangerous for being invisible to most people: overblocking of sites
caused by opt-out "child protection filters" applied by some mobile
operators to their Internet feed.
On
Techdirt.
Even against a background of repeated attempts to censor the Net,
it's still possible to become a little complacent about some of the
actions being taken by the copyright industries. For example, many
people probably feel that blocking a site like The Pirate Bay isn't
really a problem because, after all, it's just one site, right?
On
Techdirt.
One of the most depressing developments in recent years has been the
gradual adoption of legal approaches to tackling copyright infringement
that a few years ago would have been regarded as totally unacceptable,
and the hallmarks of a tinpot republic run by some ridiculous dictator.
Here's another example, this time from Israel, involving secret courts and inscrutable judgments, as Jonathan Klinger explains:
On
Techdirt.
One of the striking -- and depressing -- features of the Internet
today is the almost universal desire of governments around the world to
rein it in through new laws. We wrote about one such attempt in the
Philippines a couple of months ago, where the government is trying to
bring in some particularly wide-ranging and troubling legislation.
Although the Philippine Supreme Court put a temporary restraining order on the law, the Philippine government is not softening its stance, and has asked the court to lift the order. Its arguments are pretty worrying:
On
Techdirt.
Despite increasing competition around the world, China remains the
leader when it comes to finding ways to censor the online world. A few
months ago, the site Tech in Asia listed no less than eight ways in
which users of Sina Weibo, China's hugely-popular homegrown microblog
service, can be penalized for "inappropriate" tweets. Now it seems it has come up with a ninth:
On
Techdirt.
Back in 2010, Techdirt reported on Turkey's habit of blocking Google
over certain holdings on its various sites. Mostly these were YouTube
videos it took exception to, but other services were banned too.
An earlier case, from 2009, received less attention at the time, but
has now led to a precedent-setting ruling from the European Court of
Human Rights (ECHR) that could have a big impact on future cases in
Europe, and maybe even beyond.
On
Techdirt.
Techdirt has been following the worsening censorship situation in Russia for some time. Back in July, the country's parliament passed a new law ostensibly designed to "protect the children". It took only a couple of weeks before it was used to shut down
the whole of LiveJournal for part of the country. That was apparently
because a neo-Nazi blog had been found among the thousands of others
hosted there -- an indication of just how blunt this new instrument of
censorship is.
On
Techdirt.
One of the great things about online news sites is that they are so
easy to set up: you don't need a printing press or huge numbers of
journalists -- you just start posting interesting stories to the Web and
you are away. That is, you do unless you happen to live in Bangladesh,
where new regulations will make it much harder to set up news sites, as this story from Access Now explains:
On
Techdirt.