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Comment by huntie | Hacker News Reader

The ISPs aren't banning sites for kicks. New Zealanders have been arrested for distributing the video.

Note the bans on some of those NZ ISPs started before the video was classified as objectionable. So they’re not banning them to prevent their customers from facing charges. They’re doing it for other poorly explained reasons that aren’t legally required.

Under NZ law the snuff film was 'objectionable' from the moment it was created, the censor's job is essentially to just confirm that - the ISPs are not only stopping the film from being passed around by snuff fetishists but also protecting their own arses from potential legal issues if any of their customers access the illegal content

Great, please show me the act of parliament done in the light of day that made this illegal? The video SHOULD NOT BE WATCHED. It stand for everything I as a human abhor. However it is slippy slope, that leads to no good end.

I don't know what you mean by "act of parliament". This video should most definitely be watched in order to understand this event in full. No description of what happened can impart upon you the brutality of watching him go back in to double tap the victims. There is a severe lack of understanding of the impact of our actions when we choose to censor events like this.

People lost their lives terribly, that much can be understood without watching it. What more do you really gain by watching the video? Do you have some morbid curiosity that you need to satisfy? Do you think we should disregard the feelings of the survivors or those who lost someone close? How do you think they feel about the video being shared? How would you? Do you think they deserve respect and solidarity? If so, how does sharing the video contribute to that?

If someone wants to watch it, regardless of the intent, they should be allowed to. Disrespect should not be illegal. That's silly.

That's not even an argument. So people should be allowed to watch child porn?

Plenty of parallels between the two. People are hurt in the filming of both. It's damaging to the survivors. It feeds into the fetishes of those who would watch such a thing (it's a snuff film). In the case of this film I could argue that potential perpetrators could study the film for their own plans.

In a forum discussion on the shooting, I found a link. I clicked the link, realized it's the right video from descriptions and asked myself 'WTF am I doing? If I keep watching, that's going to have consequences for life and stopped.'.

Should I also watch rape videos? Videos of kids being molested? Animal abuse? Just so I understand those events ‘in full’? That’s absurd to me.

Should the events be discussed? Absolutely. But I don’t have to watch these things to understand how abhorrent they are.

Films, Videos, and Publications Classification Act 1993

http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/55.0/DLM...

Admittedly, the Chief Censor only published his decision on tuesday, so everything the ISPs were doing before then, they did on their own.

I don't want people to see X doesn't constitute X SHOULD NOT BE WATCHED no matter how loud you scream.

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