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Comment by Confusion | Hacker News Reader

You really want a citation for something that is obviously true? Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason". These folks are always around. Asking a citation to support that assertion is silly. Otherwise I ask you to cite support for your assertion that "a material is either forbidden or not forbidden". I'd like to point out we have courts deciding whether laws apply and whether something is forbidden or isn't covered by a specific law.

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If it's so obviously true, then you should have no problem providing a citation, right? I wouldn't mind if you violated Godwin's law either :)

The reason why I'm asking for a citation is that I live in an ex-Communist country. I know how censorship looks like and it ain't nothing like what you describe.

    Otherwise I ask you to cite support for your assertion 
    that "a material is either forbidden or not forbidden"

Providing a citation for a personal opinion which I marked as such? Fine, I'll give you a famous example of real censorship: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_19...

Related to that event, over a period of 15 years more than 130 journalists and Internet users have been jailed, including Internet webmaster Huang Qi that has been in jail since 3 June 2000 for having allowed articles about the Tiananmen Square massacre to be posted on his website, which was hosted in the United States after being initially banned in China.

    I'd like to point out we have courts deciding 
    whether laws apply and whether something is forbidden 
    or isn't covered by a specific law.

I also like to point out that your First Amendment does not refer to Google, being applicable only to the actions of your government. It's not within your right to distribute whatever information you want through a private media outlet. It is in your right however to distribute that information by yourself, as only the law can stop you.

So yes, thanks for pointing out the obvious - content is either forbidden or not forbidden.

"Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient to the general body of people as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship

I think the key word here is Suppression which doesn't have to be as extreme as in your example. Censorship is not a binary thing, it's on a scale. Simply using tactics to discourage something can be considered suppression in my view.

When a government institution or another controlling body yielding great influence coerces a media outlet into censoring something, even though that's not required by law, then I also consider that censorship. As such, I clearly consider the case of Wikileaks to be an example of a modern censorship attempt.

However, I also believe that the liberty of the press has to go both ways. A company should be free to deny the publishing of something, after all you can just start your own newspaper, or your own web engine that indexes content in this case, or whatever. It's not like your life is threatened, you just have to move your ass off your couch.

I think the issue in this thread is that you seem to only view something as censorship if the law/influence/whatever comes from the government.

> Of course in any censorship debate, there is someone that says "you can always get it through the underground, the black market, the fact that the ban isn't actively upheld, insert other similar reason".

What? In this discussion people said that Google is censoring information about torrents; but no-one has said "use a different search engine" because Google will return results about torrents, they just don't return the results using Google Instant.

"torrents" is just eight characters; even for a hunt'n'peck typist that's a few seconds before they hit [search].

But interestingly it does appear to lead to less google searches being performed for those keywords.

As to the affect this has upon actual visits to the sites in question, only they can say.

>you can always get it through the underground, the black market

"Having to press enter after typing your query" doesn't really count as descending into the black market in my eyes.

When google starts actually blocking tpb from its results across the board, rest assured that I'll be right there next to you, molotov in hand.

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