India Lurches Toward Internet Censorship

First time accepted submitter ixarux writes "India is at a crucial crossroad at the moment. Internet censorship laws are getting stricter as it begins to ban file-sharing and video-sharing websites. It started with Indian courts allowing censorship of Google, Facebook, etc. It has now gone one step ahead and decided to ask ISPs to block file-sharing sites. It is the movie industry which is again at the forefront of this. Anonymous retaliated, and targeted the websites of various Indian government websites in protest. What India lacks at this crucial juncture are debates in the public domain about this and citizens actually organizing protests as seen in the West."

Re:Isn't India the one asking the UN to take up th

[tqk]

Has India ever had a revolution?

Wow. Go read some history [wikipedia.org]. Does the name Mahatma Gandhi ring any bells?

Re:India

[bhagwad]

This might come as a surprise to you, but not all Indians live that way. And those of us who're not piss poor care deeply about a censor free Internet.

Re:India's Congress Party = One Party State

[rtb61]

The censorship is targeted at the impoverished masses, the cheap labour base the creates Indian multi-millionaires while that labour is dresses in rags. With access to internet cafes available every where, the ruling elite do not want the labour base to become to aware of the gap between rich and poor in India and of course the gap between India workers and first world workers doing the same work.

They have quite successfully be divided up by castes, religion and ethnicity, to keep them struggling amongst themselves but eventually they would work together to tackle those they keep them impoverished and a free and open internet would accelerate that.

A little clarification

[Quillem]

The Indian courts have not explicitly blocked file sharing sites. All they have provided is a generic order [google.com] to stop the copyright infringement. The company Copyright Labs [facebook.com] which is looking to stop the piracy of its films, maintain that they provided the ISPs with a list of specific URLs that were to be blocked. The ISPs have apparently decided (40 days after the blocks were requested) to block entire domains rather than individual URLs. One of these parties is liable for damages for the blanket blocks.

The courts haven't necessarily done anything wrong here besides being ingenuous.