UK Culture Secretary Wants Website Ratings, Censorship 377
kaufmanmoore writes "UK culture secretary Andy Burnham calls for a website rating system similar to the one used for movies in an interview with the Daily Telegraph. He also calls for censorship of the internet, saying, 'There is content that should just not be available to be viewed.' Other proposals he mentions in his wide-ranging calls for internet regulation are 'family-friendly' services from ISPs, and requiring takedown notices to be enforced within a specific time for sites that host content. Mr. Burnham wants to extend his proposals across the pond and seeks meetings with the Obama administration."
Re:Noooo (Score:2, Interesting)
The government _can't_ decide what can be viewed and what can't, won't stop 'em all from tryin' though!
I'm already proxying myself through servers in other countries to avoid the censorship that the big UK ISPs recently signed up for.
Re:Noooo (Score:5, Interesting)
What do you mean "bring"? The UK already has a lot of censorship. The BBFC has been censoring media for quite some while.
The BBFC's job is classification, not censorship. It has no power to ban material or demand cuts in any material. It can withhold certification, but certification is only withheld where it's considered the material in question would breach the criminal law, usually the Obscene Publications Act.
It's worth noting that over the past 10-15 years the BBFC has trended towards permissiveness, granting certification to previously 'banned' films, often attracting the ire of politicians in the process and effectively pushing the boundaries of what can be considered (legally) obscene material.
It's also introduced the principle that artistic merit can be an overriding factor, such as a few years back when the German film Taxi Zum Klo was granted a certificate enabling it's broadcast on television, despite it containing a scene featuring actual urolagnia between two gay men.
Censorship is enshrined in law thanks to the likes of the Obscene Publications Act so any criticism should be directed at our politicians, not at a body which has no choice but to work with the law presented to it and which tries to be as liberal as possible within that law.
He may be proposing a whitelist (Score:5, Interesting)
His idea seems to be (although he is being vague about it, probably on purpose) to have ISPs only allow access to sites (in context presumably meaning IP addresses) that have a certificate - one we can only assume has to be applied for.
If this is indeed what he is suggesting, its horrific. For crying out loud, Iran only operates blacklists. We would officially have worse Internet censorship than a nation that executes women for being victims of rape.
The reason totalitarian nations haven't tried a whitelist by the way, is the amount of work it requires. Of course, that may work to the advantage of the UK government. A slow process of being allowed to publish controversial material on the web would prevent non-government groups being able to react quickly to government abuse. By the time your web page got through the government approval (after your personal details have been lost a few times) the controversy has died down, government wins.
I don't want to live in a society where you need to apply to the government for permission to speak.
Re:Free speech (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:He doesn't seem big on human rights. (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:On behalf of the UK (Score:2, Interesting)
IMO, from the government point of view, this is the right moment to impose a internet censorship: the generation that actually understands the internet does not have any political power yet. More and more they wait, more it will be difficult.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
Proof once again! (Score:2, Interesting)
"The dark night of fascism is always descending in the United States and yet lands only in Europe."
Re:Noooo (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't worry; he's talking out of his arse, he hasn't a cat in hell's chance of getting a Bill through parliament to implement this spatchcock guff. We have this thing called the Human Rights Act... and if they repeal that, there's the European Court.
The problem is that even if a law is incompatible with the ECHR, there's nothing stopping the Government passing the law, and you've then got to wait until someone pays the large amount of legal fees to take this to the european courts. To pass the law, the Government just has to claim that the law is necessary for the "protection of morals". They've already done this to pass a law that criminalises even possession of images of adults they don't want people to see, so I fear that classification of websites could come just as easily, if that's what they wanted.
You may be right - sometimes these laws are just a bit of self-publicity that the Government have no plans in doing. But occasionally a law gets passed, no matter how draconian and ridiculous and unlikely it might have seemed.
Re:Free speech (Score:1, Interesting)
Constitution would not necessarily stop them.
We here in Finland have internet censorship. It is very clearly against our constitution. It is not only my IANAL opinion but when that law went to our parliament the creators sent it to be evaluated to University of Helsinki's Faculty of Law and were answered that such a law would be clearly unconstitutional.
Guess how much that slowed the law from going through? Not at all.
The thing is that not all laws need to go through the committee for constitutionality of law here. Laws just can be sent there when politicians think they should be checked. (I am not certain how the exact procedure goes) After a law has been denied from there it can't be passed without changing constitution first and that isn't easy.
But guess once if those preparing that censorship law sent it to the committee after hearing from the university that it could not pass if they would. Yeah, they didn't. And everyone opposing the law was pretty much marked as pedophile so politicians in the opposition didn't have guts, interest or knowledge to begin contesting that.
Re:Noooo (Score:4, Interesting)
They use quite a lot of tricks to censor films. For example, they will sometimes pass the film back to distributor with notes explaining why they cannot pass the film at the requested certificate. The best bit? The distributor makes the changes as specifies and then resubmits the film which is then passed. The BBFC then report that they didn't have to make any cuts.
It gets even better as the distributor (notice that I didn't say, "the film makers") have a rough idea of the what the BBFC will and wont allow at each certificate. This means that they cut it to BBFC rules in advance.
Note that the UK doesn't have an X certificate.
Using this policy, the BBFC gets away with censoring everything while claiming that they hardly ever have to make cuts.
Don't get me started on their procedures, criteria for "obscenity" and the qualifications of their staff.
Melon Farmers [melonfarmers.co.uk] used to be the best site for monitoring the BBFC although I haven't used it for a while.