--- On Fri, 12/12/08, Florence Devouard <Anthere9(a)yahoo.com> wrote:
From: Florence Devouard
<Anthere9(a)yahoo.com>
Subject: [Foundation-l] and what if...
To: foundation-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Date: Friday, December 12, 2008, 4:52 AM
I can not help reflect further on the whole Virgin Killer
story.
Whilst I am very happy of the final outcome, and thank
David Gerard and
WMF for having handled that very well, I feel also a big
disatisfied by
the way we acknowledged what happen and discuss future
steps.
We all perfectly know that if this particular image was
borderline,
there are images or texts that are illegal in certain
countries. I am
not even speaking of China here, but good old westernish
countries.
In some countries, it may be sexually-oriented picts. In
others, it may
be violence. In others yet, some texts we host are
forbidden. I am not
going to cite any examples publicly ;-)
Until now, we have blinded ourselves in claiming that
* we do not really need to respect local countries law. We
respect by
default the law of the country where projects are hosted
(USA)
* if a country is not happy with some of the content, they
can bring the
affair in front of a local tribunal. Then it will have to
go in front of
an international tribunal. This will last 5 years at least.
Good for us.
* if a legal decision forbid us to show a certain article
or a certain
image, we'll implement a system to block showing the
images or text in a
certain country.
And that was it !
Now, the fact is that we see that other mecanisms can work
much better
than the legal route. It is sufficient that a Foundation,
privately
funded by ISP, establish a black list, for the image/text
to be not
accessible. And on top of that, in a few hours, for most of
the citizens
of this country to be blocked from editing.
Now, seriously, what is more important right now ?
That citizens can not read one article ?
Or that all the citizens of a country can not edit all
articles any more ?
I would argue that the content of Wikipedia can be copied
and
distributed by anyone, so preventing reading our site is
not such a bid
deal.
However, editing can only be done on our site, so the
impact of blocking
in editing is quite dramatic.
My point is not to bend on local laws at all.
But I'd like to see people change their minds about the
traditional
route we used to think we could be blocked in
"democratic" countries
(legal route, with local then international tribunal).
And I'd like to see people think about the "worst
cases", and then work
on how to decrease the impact (or prevent entirely) these
worst cases.
Scenario planning in short.
If tomorrow, a really illegal-in-UK image is reported to
the IWF, they
will block it for real. And they will block again editing.
Is that a
concern ? Can it happen again ? What's the risk of it
happening again ?
If it does, what do we do ? Which discussions should we
start to avoid
the entire edit-blocking again ?
And... beyond UK, what do we know about the
censorship-systems the
countries are setting into place ? I understood that
Australia was
setting up the same system than UK, but that France was
rather thinking
of other system. Should not we get to know and understand
better what
governments are planning ? Should we try to lobby them to
adopt certains
choices or not ? Should we help them adopt wise practices ?
Or should we just wait to see what's next ?
Ant
I am strongly against collaborating with Westernish governments to help make their
censorship more effective. I personally don't think we should help anyone make their
censorship more effective. But if we are to decide we would rather have citizens under
censorship able to participate with censorship rather than not participate at all, we
should not discriminate with which governments we are willing to help.
Personally I don't get censorship, nor the complacency Europeans generally have about
living under it. I don't get it but I can recognize that many other people see it
differently and may want to support censorship. But we can't pick and choose which
government's censorship we will support. This is an international organization and
nothing in mission expresses support for western mores over others. Selectively helping
some governments censor would be a disastrous move for WMF to make.
Birgitte SB
Hello
I did not mean to suggest we should collaborate with whatever
government. I meant that we could maybe learnt from what happenned and
think about scenarios for different futures, and prepare ourselves for
these different futures.
Ant