I like that in US, UK, Canada, DE censorship is called filtering.
Blocking illegal content isn't censorship. It creates the technical framework and weak precedent for censorship and I agree we shouldn't do it this way, but it's not more censorship than seizing a bunch of copied DVDs at the border would be.
Does your definition depend on what is illegal? For example, if an incumbent government were able to illegalize media from opposing parties, and ISPs blocked the websites of those parties, is it filtering or censorship?
On top of that, the insane prices are regulated by the CRTC, a regulatory body controlled by the companies that are setting the prices and think this is totally fair.
To be precise, the CRTC is theorically an independent public entity. In practice however, the chairman since 2017 is Ian Scott, an ex-lobbyist who worked for ISPs and telecommunications companies. He's been caught meeting with one of our major ISPs' (Bell) then-COO, now CEO Mirko Bibic, right before overturning their own 2019 order that would have forced large ISPs to lower their wholesale rates to smaller ISPs, rolling them back to previous (much higher) 2016 values.
The CRTC is a joke.
You wouldn't say that they GPDR or anti-tracking web browser tech is censorship, would you?
I’m guessing most authoritarian censorship is, in the local legal system, just seizing illegal goods.
Wether its censorship or not is more dependent on the type of information/goods, and to some extent the moral or cultural framework of the observer.
Is the suggested ban in Sweden on posting photos/videos of dead people censorship or just a reasonable way to protect relatives of e.g terrorist attacks?
> not more censorship than seizing a bunch of copied DVDs at the border would be.
If your IP is being blocked in a country due to a court order you are absolutely being censored.
> If your IP is being blocked in a country due to a court order you are absolutely being censored.
That's a nonsense statement. Declaring something illegal is how governments censor.
Does the law say "you may not write bad things about the government or good things about gay people and if you do we'll block your site"? Anything blocked under that law is censorship. Does it say "you must have permission from the rightsholder to distribute any copyrighted material and if you don't we'll block your site"? Blocking under that law, whether you agree with it or not, isn't censorship.
But that is not "illegal content" - that is illegal sharing of legal content. The government making content itself illegal is much much the definition of censorship.
This is bad, but it's really not censorship in the same sense that China censors Tiananmen Square, etc. You can talk about the NHL game, write about it in the news, share screenshots, teach it in school, upload an animated recreation on Youtube...
> upload an animated recreation on Youtube
https://www.quora.com/What-do-Chinese-citizens-particularly-...
We call it "filtering", "anti hate speech", or "anti child-porn".
I think copyright enforcement should be seen as a form of censorship, regardless of whether or not one agrees with copyright laws.
This Wikipedia article about internet censorship seems to have been partially written by people who think that copyright enforcement is a form of censorship as well: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_censorship
And then the First Amendment promptly nullified that power by categorically stating that the freedom of speech shall not be infringed. Distribution of content is speech, and copyright enforcement penalizes it, which infringes the freedom of speech. This is how the exceptions for Fair Use came about, by attempting to reconcile the Copyright Clause with the First Amendment, but Fair Use is only a half-measure which does not fully avoid the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have Rule A saying that you may do something and Rule B saying that you must not do that thing, they don't combine to create a compromise rule which says that you can do that thing most of the time with a few narrow exceptions.
A case that sort of rubs up against this in the U.S. -- I use an American example because in Canada s.1 circumscribes all legal rights, including freedom of expression, so it would be academic whether this raised speech concerns or not -- is Morse v. Frederick.
In this case, a student, Frederick, raised a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in front of some television cameras. The behaviour occurred off school grounds but nearby, and during an event that students were allowed to leave school early to attend. The school suspended Frederick because his banner promoted drug use.
A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was. One argument is that it was essentially dadaist, absurdist speech (Frederick's claim. Another argument is that it was promoting criminal behaviour (the school principal's claim; Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito in the opinion). Another argument is that it was political speech, aimed at contesting a public policy (Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg in dissent; Alito and Kennedy in concurrence)
Although there were other issues in the case, namely to do with how speech is regulated within schools and whether this constituted a school event, one of the undercurrents is that constitutional protections for political speech seem to be more crucial to many of the justices than constitutional protections for gibberish speech.
So I don't think it's crazy to suggest, at a minimum, that there exists a well-support denotative use of "censorship" that specifically refers to speech with political characteristics, rather than all speech. Through that lens, copyright enforcement could either be censorship (to the extent that the enforcement is designed or has the effect of prohibiting the dissemination of political speech or prohibits commentary on a public policy) or not (to the extent the content being restricted is fundamentally apolitical). And this is true even if there are other denotations that consider stopping any speech to be censorship.
Censorship is prohibiting speech or blocking a speaker because of the content or alleged content of their speech.
Not all censorship is unconstitutional. The legal blocking of curse words amd nudity on broadcast TV is clearly censorship regardless of if the intent or effect of cursing while nude on TV is political.
It is true that free speech protections against the censorship of political speech do tend to be stronger.
Also generally speaking, rules that prohibit speech in certain contexts or manners without regard for their content or the speaker (thus not censorship) tend are held to a lower standard for legal justification than laws that do engage in censorship.
In this case, the question is does this type qualify as "not-censorship" because somehow blocking "content that infringes our IP" is not restricting speech on the basis on its content. To me it seems obvious that this is a restriction of speech that depends on it's alleged content.
To the federal courts, too, which is why “fair use” was a court-created Constitutional limit on copyright before it was incorporated into the statute (the reason for the weird standards in the statute is that the factors from the court-issued rule were incorporated directly into the statute.)
But that's not germane, because “censorship” is not restricted to “restrictions on speech that violate the First Amendment”, so the US Supreme Court “parsing about which category of speech” something is has no bearing on the meaning of “censorship.” In fact, consideration of what category speech is only matters in the First Amendment context after one has determined that censorship (and, particularly, government censorship) is occurring. Only then is it important to parse the details of which set of standards to apply to determine if the government censorship involved is Constitutionally prohibited.
It's not about who does it, it's about why they do it. Is blocking illegal-due-to-copyright content a slippery slope to blocking illegal-because-opressive-regime-said-so content? Yes. Is "slippery slope" a bad argument? Also yes.
I agree having court-enforced IP block lists controlled by private companies is bad. But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.
I might, depends on the context. Copyright laws can indeed result in censorship. Let's say those DVDs have an additional commentary track.
> But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.
So when your IP address gets block in Canada for a year, regardless of what content or speech it was engaged in amd without any attempt to verify that you indeed were sharing content out of copyright, you aren't being censored? Come on.
When a government tells ISPs to block content that it believes doing so serves a greater good, that is filtering.
You can argue all day about the greater good and if filtering is justified, but the difference is China explicitly censors opposing viewpoints.
If Germany blocks sites promoting the Nazi party, is that doing good because such promotion does bad, or is it censoring an opposing political viewpoint that's competing with it for power? Even if the government has the support of most of the population, it's still a political power struggle between them and the Nazis.
Democracy is done in America if more people think the government controlling what people read and think is some sort of social good.
You can have good intentions, but still cause terrible things to happen.
In the last year we saw government's pushing experimental drug on healthy young people in order to add a few extra months of life to 75+ year olds with multiple health conditions, and the extremely obese. Locking down, destroying small business and causing serious food price inflation, that will send millions of people around the world into absolute poverty. A drug that did not stop transmission, had pages worth of short-term side effects, and yet to be determined long term effects. One thing it did not due, was lower the 3x jabbed from catching covid, since they get infected now at highest rates now. How long before we go from "safe and effective" to "no one forced you to take it".
It really is debatable what if anything governments COVID policy accomplished. Why shouldn't people be able to debate it?