[Foundation-l] and what if...

[Anthony]

On Fri, Dec 12, 2008 at 4:27 PM, George Herbert <george.herbert at gmail.com>wrote:

> Let's take a step back.
>
> This incident arose because of a third party making a judgement call
> about content which was an album cover by an at-the-time leading rock
> group, had been published fairly continuously for 30-ish years, and
> which was presumably well known to legal authorities by dint of being
> very clearly a public publication.
>
> The actual details here fairly scream out that one must conclude that
> there's a presumption of legality for the photo in question, whether
> it's offensive or not.
>

That's a good point, and ultimately it was one that the IWF essentially
agreed with.  They still consider the image to be possibly illegal, and I
suspect they like I believe that it probably is illegal.  But they've
considered the other issues involved and decided not to block the image.

I'm sure they're in the process of changing their review system to take
these issues into account.  At the same time, requiring *all* images to be
"found illegal" before taking action, would not be a good idea.

I think there are a lot of different opinions out there, but personally I
think the IWF is overall doing a positive thing.  I think the government has
a right to censor the distribution of child pornography, and I think ISPs
have the right to censor anything they want (though they ought to only
censor things that ought to be illegal).

Someone unaware of the history might legitimately conclude differently
> looking at it.  However, we're not unaware of the history, and the
> recent kerfuffle was clearly by a group who must have viewed the
> Wikipedia page prior to blocking and have no way to claim plausible
> deniability of the history of the image in question.


We don't know that the person (or group) who made the decision was the same
person (or group) that viewed the Wikipedia page.  In fact, I would tend to
believe the opposite.

Anthony