Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

Brit ISPs censor Wikipedia over 'child porn' album cover

www.theregister.co.uk

Six British ISPs are filtering access to Wikipedia after the site was added to an Internet Watch Foundation child-pornography blacklist, according to Wikipedia administrators.

As of Sunday morning UK time, certain British web surfers were unable to view at least one Wikipedia article tagged with ostensible child porn. And, in a roundabout way, the filtering has resulted in Wikipedia admins banning large swaths of the United Kingdom from editing the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit."

On Friday, Wikipedia administrators noticed that Virgin Media, Be Unlimited/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon, and Opal were routing Wikipedia traffic through a small number of transparent proxy servers as a way of blocking access to the encyclopedia's article on Virgin Killer, a mid-1970s record album from German heavy band Scorpions.

(visit the link for the full news article)

I haven't looked at the image in question, but I don't think that's the real issue here.

These ISPs established this 'filtering' system rather quickly, to comply with British law, apparently. Does anyone have more specific on exactly what forms of censorship the law requires, and who determine what should be censored?

The big problem here is that this is not just content censorship. Wikipedia uses the IP address to identify users, and allow or disallow editing of pages, in order to prevent vandalism. Because access to Wikipedia from these ISPs now all comes from the same address, there's no way to distinguish users from vandals. So, people using those ISPs are now prevented from editing or otherwise contributing to Wikipedia.

Is this the shape of things to come?


www.theregister.co.uk
(visit the link for the full news article)

Originally posted by Ian McLean


I haven't looked at the image in question, but I don't think that's the real issue here.

Well, it is an issue all the same. I know the album cover from my youth; whilst I've never been a fan of the Scorpions myself, I knew people that did like them and had that album. We used to laugh at the fact that we found it weird, as young kids ourselevs, that adults were putting naked kids on record sleeves whereas if kids were creating record sleeves it would be naked adults.

The cover itself is hard to defend to be honest. It's a very young girl completely naked with a 'cracked glass' effect placed over her vagina. It's not even 'weird' or 'arty' like the Blind Faith eponymous cover with the topless young girl and the weird silver spaceship or even a naked baby like Nirvana's second album. It's just a very blunt image with a fairly blunt album title to go with it: Virgin Killer. Maybe a small case could be made if it wasn't called Virgin Killer, I don't know.

Wiki censorship and ISP filtering is a concern in general though. I think it will only get worse.