[Foundation-l] and what if...

[Birgitte SB]

--- On Fri, 12/12/08, Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com> wrote:

> From: Florence Devouard <Anthere9 at yahoo.com>
> Subject: [Foundation-l] and what if...
> To: foundation-l at 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