Philippine Cybercrime Law Put On Indefinite Hold

An anonymous reader writes "The Supreme Court of the Philippines has put an indefinite hold on a controversial law that would, among other things, ban cybersex and porn. A host of groups, particularly journalists, had resoundingly criticized the law, the Cybercrime Prevention Act of 2012, as broad and out of touch with how the Internet works. The Philippines' National Union of Journalists, for example, called its definition of libel 'a threat not only against the media and other communicators but anyone in the general public who has access to a computer and the Internet.'"

Re:I can't join the free speech religion.

[matthiasvegh]

If a government (or any other body) can disable sites/remove content at will for _any_ justification without due process, the same can be done for content that was not originally covered by the law. i.e.: political site, shut it down because it had porn on it. (regardless of whether or not there actually was any on the site). The problem with bans against subsets of speech is not that the actual subsets are considered to be valuable, but because the vagueness of what is considered pornographic means lawyers can just slap it on to anything.

Re:I can't join the free speech religion.

[Anonymous Coward]

(_i_)

That's ASCII art of a woman bending over.

Shut down Slashdot immediately.

Re:I can't join the free speech religion.

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn isn't speech, bit torrent downloads aren't speech, and cybersex isn't speech.

You're a fucking idiot.

The courts (assuming you're talking about America) have repeatedly upheld porn as protected speech.

We have no proof that legal porn/cybersex leads to a better way of life.

The test for free speech isn't a better way of life, but it's intended to prevent assholes like you from telling other people what they can and can't do.

It's very much about the ego and not at all about the sacred

Fuck the sacred, fuck your god, fuck Allah, fuck Buddha, fuck Jesus, fuck Mohammed, fuck Cthulu, fuck the Flying Spaghetti Monster, fuck all of them if it means douchebags like you think you get to control what other people do.

Go beat your wife or rape your kids or whatever you idiots do.

Re:I can't join the free speech religion.

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Nothing particularly requires that 'performance art' only include things that are legal and/or unobjectionable. However, punishing people for doing things that are illegal for other reasons during the course of producing 'art' is not generally considered to be a restriction on freedom of speech, any more than the illegality of sacrificing babies to satan is considered an infringement on religious freedom...

There are some edge cases that get tricky(mostly on the side of people totally incidentally banning things that are required for speech or religions they don't like); but it isn't a terribly difficult conceptual distinction. Banning a speech act as such is a clear infringement of speech rights; but that doesn't confer any immunity from any other relevant laws on the speaker, should their speech involve breaching them.