Indian court forces Facebook, Google to censor content | Hacker News Reader

Indian court forces Facebook, Google to censor content

zdnet.com

75 pointsSlimy23 comments

How it is different from DMCA takedown requests? Under DMCA you request website to takedown content that violates copyright. Under Indian law, you takedown the content that is deemed religiously offensive or blasphemous.

Edit for downvotes: I'm against takedown requests. I'm extremely disappointed that Indian govt. is taking such a narrow view. I'm genuinely interested in knowing how these requests are different from DMCA takedown requests.

You are right. FTA: Last year, India passed a law that makes companies responsible for user content posted on their websites, requiring them to take down anything deemed offensive (”ethnically objectionable,” “blasphemous,” or “grossly harmful.”) within 36 hours in case of a complaint.

The only difference is that the exact definition of offensive content is not clear.

Interesting. Unfortunately, its even more harmful than DMCA. Resolving copyright violations is really easy. However, if I praise Richard Dawnkins in my blog and some religious retard finds that offensive then it should be taken down because it can be deemed as "blasphemous". Who will decide what is good and what is offensive? It will lead to extremely messy situation.

"Resolving copyright violations is really easy"

I think may be slightly off here. Some cases of copyright violation are quite blatent, but many others become tricky.

Music companies have been known to file DMCA complaints over content that their own PR-branches filed for publicity. Other times there is the question of derivative work and whether it is fair use, authorized, or in violation. For that matter, when talking about older works, something can be under copyright in one country but in the public domain in another, depending on their copyright term.

In contast, with the question of what is offensive, it matters greatly on who you ask. All but the most banal and obvious facts will likely offend someone.

I should have mentioned, compared to resolving whether content is religiously offensive or not copyright violations are easier to deal with. And with digital signatures it can be detected by algorithms too. But your point is valid too.

It's not mentioned in the article, but I'm curious if there is any notification to the users that posted the content, or any recourse to have that content reinstated. Is anyone familiar with Indian law?

In the case of Google it would be pretty hard to give users notifications, because Google pulls the content automatically, without the users having a Google account, without a reliable standard that Google can use to get some email address or something it can send a message to.

The best they could do is to send notifications to the email address set in Google's Webmaster Tools. This way notifications may be received by at least the webmasters that are aware that their content may get banned.

The worst part about this is that this creates yet another precedent. So Google threatening to pull out of China and then moving to Hong Kong was all for nothing if they end up censoring websites in India.

We always complain about the Internet side of things, forgetting that in most cases these issues are caused by local laws, for whatever political, cultural, etc. reason, are lagging behind the currently accepted human rights (this is hard to define rigorously but I'm sure we would all agree on a common core). Many examples of this can be given: China (of, course), but also many Arab countries, as well as Turkey (who had blocked YouTube at one point and continues to block other sites). And evidently, now India.

It is interesting that the US is an outlier among these countries in that the motivations of censorship here is motivated more by big business profit than politics.

"Indian officials have seen illustrations showing Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and Congress president Sonia Gandhi in compromising positions, as well as pigs running through Islam’s holy city of Mecca. The punishment for such offenses can be several years of jail time and financial penalties."

"Several years of jail time" for an offensive picture? There's something wrong about that.

US truly values the freedom of speech. In India there is freedom of speech too but it comes with certain conditions. People of key government positions, successful members of civil society etc. command certain respect. And you don't even call them by first name let alone vandalizing their pictures (unless they are cartoons in newspapers). Its still a traditional society. Flag burning is considered crime in India whereas in western countries it won't be problematic. You can also wear flag patterned clothes but in India you will be frowned upon by everyone including your friends and family.

What you're speaking of doesn't sound like a very useful form of "freedom of speech." It's the right to criticize key government officials and other powerful people which is MOST important, because they wield so much power -- it's much less important to be able to publicly criticize your crazy neighbor Bob.

You can criticize government officials. A form of protest can be anything from organized rally to famous Gandhian methodology of fasting. But society in general shuns anything that is below belt and dignity. Be it your neighbor or local political leader or your own uncle.

I don't understand how people still don't get this: you never have to protect the speech you like. No one needs freedom of speech to protect the speech everyone likes. As Noam Chomsky said,

If you believe in freedom of speech, you believe in freedom of speech for views you don't like. Stalin and Hitler, for example, were dictators in favor of freedom of speech for views they liked only. If you're in favor of freedom of speech, that means you're in favor of freedom of speech precisely for views you despise.

National Socialist Party of America v. Village of Skokie paints the picture clearly: almost no one liked the Nazis or wanted them in Skokie, but that's precisely why their speech needs to be protected.

This is another step down the path toward a partitioned internet. Separate national networks, walled off to the point that they may not be functionally interoperable.

The U.S. and China really got the censorship ball rolling, and there are countless others just itching to cleanse the internet of content they find disagreeable.

As a Canadian resident, I get a sampling of a partitioned internet when I try to use sites like Hulu or Pandora. The effort to bring national borders to the Internet is well underway, and unfortunately it isn't limited to the usual slate of repressive governments. I don't wish to compare my "plight" with that of someone in China or Iran, of course. I recognize the difference.

Yes, but this has been happening for years, and in many other countries. There are instances from 10+ years ago of places like Germany and France trying to and ultimately succeeding in banning the auction of Nazi memorabilia from Yahoo and etc. because these auctions violated domestic law.

The scary thing is what might happen if companies who are forced to censor their content become unwilling or actually unable to censor the content to the extent required by whatever domestic law. In that case, we wouldn't even need some sort of overarching international law to "control" the internet because the most restrictive law any given nation puts in place will be the controlling law. This has already happened in all manners of international law, where a given country, often the US, has the most restrictive law that all other countries and therefore de facto obligated to follow.

Well ... The real motive for this is to some way cut out sites like wiki leaks from revealing the names of corrupt Indian politicians who have siphoned of tax payer's money to their Swiss banks accounts.

> Google India meanwhile has removed web pages deemed offensive to Indian political... leaders

That's the most dangerous part.

What are possible consequences if those organizations ignore or defy these "requests"?

(By and by, what would happen if said organizations defied a EU decree?)

I kind of made this point a week ago, so sorry for repeating myself. If the ‘requests’ are ignored, India passes a law. If Google and Facebook ignore the law, then India follows the USA’s lead and arrests any Google and Facebook executives it can get its hands on, just as the USA arrests and prosecutes executives of online gaming organizations that are entirely operated outside of its physical borders but have US customers.

So, in other words, Google stops operating in India.

Don't know why this was downvoted; it seems probable that Google would leave before the issue was escalated to the point of their executives being arrested.

or they would simply comply like they did in china for many years. Before you mention that the pulled out for the censorship, that was almost certainly nothing but a cover story, the real reason was Chinese government supported hacking, and constant redirects to Baidu.

The internet is like the audible spectrum in air, it doesn't need "cleaning up" through censorship. It's not about porn or saving the children or objectionable content at all. It's about saying: "This internet, and all the bits that flow on it are my responsibility", if you want to use it, you'll have to do what I tell you do to. And if you don't do what I want you to do on it, I won't let you on it. These Dr-Evils would censor people's vocal chords if they could.

The next internet better be wireless, encrypted, exclude ISP's all together. Preferably where two individuals from two different countries can exchange without any other human getting in the middle and stop the data flow. We need to give the Internet itself an ability to "cut off" nations that want to own the entire thing. The problem is we programmers, engineers and innovators are too damn reasonable and accommodating. It's time for us to fight back and say no. No we are not allowing you to have censorship. Needs to be a new law that no standing member of congress may be re-elected if any part of the internet is censored.

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