Quote:
Originally Posted by Maggy J
Hmm! Well I'm pretty sure a large company with the name Virgin attached to it will have sought legal advice about an issue like this before taking such an action...after all any media company is going to make sure they aren't likely to face prosecution at some point and will be thinking about all those parents who use and whose children use their services.
Agreed censorship seems to be the thin end of the wedge BUT you are living in cloud cuckoo land if you thing that the internet is going to avoid it's effects altogether.   |
Why not?
It's the internet, there are no laws governing the internet as an entity. The only applicable laws are the laws where the site is based/hosted, in this case the US. WP have already stated this particular image is legal under US law and so are not obliged to remove it (It has also been suggested the image is legal in the UK anyway though it is dubious under an exemption for art), hence they have not done so.
What next? It's not about protecting the child in the image (they did consensually pose for it and probably get paid a significant sum for doing so) since the image is old. It's not even really about the issue of child porn or Wikipedia.
It's more the point that an unelected, unaccountable body can control what we view on the internet. So let's say someone complains about something else to the IWF. They remove it. Where do you draw the line? What about them editing content they don't want UK users to see? That's something you see in North Korea and China not the UK.
Not to mention the fact they have done this totally inappropriately. They should be getting a court of law to prove this image is illegal under UK law and getting the court to order Wikipedia remove it. But if they do that, what about the host of other sites showing the image? Amazon, eBay, other etailers? Should we censor them? At the end of the day an internet encyclopedia having an image about an album - as well as the controversy over its cover - is a poor medium to censor.
Take a look at the wider picture and you'll see the bigger deal. As I said, this is not about child porn, Wikipedia or anything - though this has kinda triggered the controversy. It's about censorship. Looking at the base of this, it was only a matter of time before something triggered this, if not this, it would have been something else.