2009/1/15 Chris McKenna <cmckenna(a)sucs.org>rg>:
On Thu, 15 Jan 2009, Thomas Dalton wrote:
[The Internet Archve]
need to do something to minimise the risk of illegal images being
archived.
Illegal according to whose defintion? The definition that applies
currently, or the defintion that applied at the time the page was
archived?
Currently. Everyone has to obey the law as it stands now.
AIUI the archive is hosted in the US, so why should
they care about
whether material is illegal in the UK? If they did they would also have to
care about whether material is illegal China, Afghanistan, Germany, Papua
New Guinea, etc, etc, etc.
Well, they need to follow US law, but I think the definitions of child
pornography are pretty similar in most cases (there are going to be
corner cases that differ, of course).
The new UK law on extreme porn has made/will make
illegal a huge number of
images that were not illegal previously - removing such images from
archived versions of pages is implying they were illegal at the time,
which they were not.
Why does it imply that? You can't host illegal content, it doesn't
matter if it was legal when you started hosting it or not. Of course,
that's a UK law, so isn't entirely relevant.
Equally, when the Taliban were in power in Afghanistan
all images of
people were illegal. Should then all images of people be removed from all
internet pages in the archive that might be accessed from Afghanistan? Or
perhaps just those webpages that were archived during that period in
Afghanistan's history?
The Taliban aren't in power in Afghanistan (well, not all of it), so
what relevance do their laws have to anything?
Also, how would you propose finding all the images
that are illegal by
whatever definition you choose? Remember that no only do you have to
check every sight archived (a susbstantial percentage of those on the
internet) but also every version of every site - for a busy site you're
talking up to 20 versions per year, maybe more.
Even if censorship of the archive were desirable (personnally I think it
is anything but) I just cannot see how it is achievable.
Indeed, as I said, I don't know what the best course of action for
them is. Copying and making available large amounts of content without
anyone examining it first is a rather risky business model.