Censorship in democratic countries

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Asp-Z
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13 Oct 2010, 10:10 am

Considering the level of government monitoring you guys have, I was surprised to see that you don't have an organisation in charge of banning things in the US actually.

iamnotaparakeet
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16 Oct 2010, 11:50 am

Asp-Z wrote:

In the US, it's illegal to merely discuss technology which can bypass copy protection systems.

In the UK, almost 100% of ISPs have a filtering system which is controlled solely by one organisation which has, in the past, blocked access to Wikipedia. The system used for this is silent and secretive - if you go to a blocked site, it will look like a connection error, and sites can be added at any time without going through court.

Additionally, there are three movies which are banned in the UK, and four currently banned in the US.

While there are many campaigns against the censorship carried out by China and other such countries, most of us seem blind to the censorship which happens right under our noses.

I personally am a big believer of freedom of speech, and I find it really stupid that "free countries" actively censor media.

What's your opinion on this? Better say it quick before doing so becomes a crime.

There's something to be said about the potential of calling the desire to watch media for free the desire to commit theft, however there's also something to be said that it's about as much a version of theft as having watched it on television previously (at least for the end-user's perspective) and that the companies and artists who once made a good product are trying to continue profiting from their work rather than making anything new of the same caliber. Anyhow, the discussion of committing a crime, whether the crime is actually immoral or whether the law violated is contrived, is not the same as actually committing the crime and ought not to be punished. Silencing people just encourages people to go into hiding and develop even more extreme views due to a feeling of persecution caused by the prohibition of the freedom of speech.

MotherKnowsBest
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16 Oct 2010, 12:23 pm

BigK wrote:

What does democracy have to do with anything.

We have democratically elected a government that has appointed a body to to decide what can and cannot be shown.

It it was such a big we could vote for a party that pledged to do away with censorship.

Some people voted for the Pirate party. I guess that not enough people trusted them to run the economy though.

Well said.

I'm from the UK but currently live in Sweden where censorship is far more relaxed. I've stopped listening to the radio and watching tv here because I don't want to see/hear the stuff which I know wouldn't be allowed in the UK. Foul language from radio presenters while you're eating your cornflakes in the morning is not cool.

Asp-Z
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16 Oct 2010, 12:27 pm

What does democracy have to do with censorship? Democracy meant to mean power to the people, the government is meant to be there to serve us. It's not meant to be our nanny.

The Pirate Party has my 100% support, BTW. They're massive in Sweden, so much so that the Swedish Pirate Party has a seat in the European Parliament, and they're gaining popularity in the UK too. Mark my words, when the teenagers of today hit 18, they will get a lot more votes.

greenblue
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16 Oct 2010, 1:32 pm

Orwell wrote:

Somewhat reminds me of the lists of allegedly "banned books" that I come across sometimes... more often than not, what they mean by "banned" is "at some point it was assigned reading for high school kids and at least one parent bitched about it." My high school English teacher even tried to convince us that one of our books (I think it was Madame Bovary) had previously been banned in America.

I think the term has been used as well for books or films that have been put on hold for some time, because of controversy, we could say temporary banning I suppose, but later approved. The film Deep throat comes to mind.

I believe, currently the issue lies mostly, regarding what can be considered child pornography or child abuse, there was recently a case about that, and likely conservatives were who wanted to ban a film that depicted a rape scene.

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iamnotaparakeet
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16 Oct 2010, 1:36 pm

Quote:

The list of banned books was called the Index. It was invented by the Catholic Church to delineate which books a good Catholic wasn't allowed to read and was instituted to reduce the progress of "heretical"™ Protestantism.

iamnotaparakeet
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16 Oct 2010, 3:20 pm

Asp-Z wrote:

In the UK and Sweeden do they have an Australia ballot type of election system or one more similar to the American all-or-nothing election system?

Asp-Z
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16 Oct 2010, 3:24 pm

iamnotaparakeet wrote:

Asp-Z wrote:

In the UK and Sweeden do they have an Australia ballot type of election system or one more similar to the American all-or-nothing election system?

In the UK, it's a system of the party needing to get the right number of seats, which they get when they achieve the highest number of votes in a constituency, then the winner is whoever gets the most seats overall. As far as I know, other European countries such as Sweden tend to have similar systems. I have no idea if this is like Australia or America or not.

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16 Oct 2010, 4:04 pm

Asp-Z wrote:

Considering the level of government monitoring you guys have, I was surprised to see that you don't have an organisation in charge of banning things in the US actually.

We have a Constitution that [i]generally[i] puts the kibosh on things of that nature. Hence we're not yet blanketed in surveillance cameras and can freely voice our offensive opinions without fear of legal sanction.

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Asp-Z
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16 Oct 2010, 4:10 pm

Dox47 wrote:

Asp-Z wrote:

Considering the level of government monitoring you guys have, I was surprised to see that you don't have an organisation in charge of banning things in the US actually.

Yeah, when it comes to CCTV we're worse than China in the UK, but we can voice opinions without legal sanctions too. For now, at least :roll:

Though, both of our countries have laws put in place which we're told are to "fight terrorism" but are potentially hazardous to our rights due to how they're misused. That's the biggest threat to freedom as far as I'm concerned.

Not to mention all the monitoring and logging which goes on supposedly for our protection - again, terrorism is the excuse.

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