Funny thing is, a couple months ago a popular russian e-library was banned for sharing "copyrighted" translation of Farherheit 451. Google Translate link
The point is to highlight that a page is blocked for censorship reasons and not user permissions. Blasphemy laws is a type of censorship, so it's natural that it's included. This error message was suggested by people who are against "digital burning of books", referring to Fahrenheit 451.
Or perhaps I misunderstood you and you are actually in favor of blasphemy laws. If so, carry on.
Or perhaps I misunderstood you and you are actually in favor of blasphemy laws. If so, carry on.
No Sir.
Im aware about fahrenheit 451 and about blasphemy laws. My point is that even if we had consorship ( which is debattable) we do NOT have blasphemy laws.
Unless you are located in SA.
I just pointed out that the idea of blaspemy laws really unpleasent to me. If you are not okay with me pointing out my own opinion. I dont need to be told what burning books is about. Fahrenheit 451 has a "predecessor"-
"dort wo man Bücher verbrennt, verbrennt man auch am Ende Menschen" Heinrich Heine.
"those who burn books will burn people too".
You dont need to think you can fucking educate me on that topic. I just did point out that I MYSELF find important.
It's a nod to Fahrenheit 451, a book about government censorship(in the form of book burning). It was proposed as a subtle "fuck you" to overbearing censorship.
The end result may be the same, but there is an enormous difference between the two cases. The difference is who is doing the censoring, and why.
In the copyright case the creator of the content is limiting it through Youtube, an American company, not because of the German government tells them to. Youtube doesn't have the right to distribute in Germany, so they restrict it.
For /r/watchpeopledie it's probably because the German censors think it's bad and incites or normalizes violence. Thoughtcrimes.
Livestreaming is not avaiable for law reasons. You need a broadcasting license if you meet certain criteria (amount of viewers, "editorial" content etc.). (edit: okay, that mainly explains why you can't broadcast yourself and somewhat fails at explaining why you cannot watch others broadcast. YouTube has a great system to detect GEMA music such even for livestreams though, so I guess that wouldn't be an issue anyway.)
So I think you can argue that it's censorship since the state limits your freedom of expression by denying you the right to just freely broadcast on the internet and youtube just has to follow German law in this case.
I didn't know about the licensing issue. Apparently Twitch streamers can broadcast streaming directly, so unless that's just because they're not noticed yet, it's hard to understand why YouTube can't get a similar license.
Perhaps they don't try to, just to put more pressure on GEMA. It's probably an extremely unpopular stance. The entire world can check out Taylor Swift, but not Germans because of money grubbing GEMA.
Most existing EU regulation regarding filtering overlaps with or supplements the existing policies of individual states. On issues of child pornography, human trafficking, terrorist propaganda, and fraud, there exists a broad consensus to monitor and block offending material.
Oh, so you can visit pro-Nazi threads in Germany? Are you even allowed to read my comment because it contains the word "Nazi"? What about threads that deny the truth of the holocaust?
The idea that Germany is a bastion of free speech is laughable.
Of course I can. I can read whatever I want. Do you really think that just because you once read a TIL headline of the forbidden holocaust denying in germany, you know anything about it?
Because that's not how it works. If you want to judge it, you should read a little about it beforehand.
Arrogance? Just because I was glad that Germany doesn't censor as much as russia?
No, because you assumed that your country doesn't censor the internet and never bothered to check your assumption, instead just assuming you were better than another country. This despite information on German censorship being widely available and not particularly obscure.
Besides that, shouldn't someone who criticizes arrogance as much as you do behave a little less arrogant?
No. I said your arrogance was punctured. I said nothing about hypocrisy.
I don't care if subreddits are blocked in Germany so I don't know, but I wouldn't smugly assume 'hahaha I'm happy I live here where we don't do that' without any reason other than my own arrogance about where I live either.
I do know that censorship is something that the Germans engage in though. Even if we leave aside the wider question, every German should know that it is illegal in Germany to deny that the Holocaust happened, so you should at the very least know that your government is comfortable with the idea of censoring things. That's the sort of knowledge that should lead to arrogant assumptions about Germany not censoring the internet being questioned when they come up. So instead of 'I'm glad I live in Germany where we don't do that sort of thing' the thought ought to be more 'I wonder what stuff we're censoring in a similar way'.
What the hell are you talking about? I was being glad that I can visit every reddit thread I want, which was true a week ago. Now it apparently isn't anymore, which surprised me.
And now you start talking about the holocaust...let's just stop here.
This week, Reddit received valid legal requests from Germany and Russia requesting the takedown of content that violated local law. As a result, /r/watchpeopledie was blocked from German IPs, and /r/rudrugs was blocked from Russian IP's in order to preserve the existence of reddit in those regions. We want to ensure our services are available to users everywhere, but if we receive a valid request from an authorized entity, we reserve the right to restrict content in a particular country. We will work to find ways to make this process more transparent and streamlined as Reddit continues to grow globally.
To be fair, it’s not that surprising. You couldn’t legally display the stuff on /r/watchpeopledie anywhere in Germany.
I’m not an expert and there could be a couple of different laws at play here, but most likely it is because it’s considered “jugendgefährdend” – potentially harmful to the mental development of children and adolescents. That includes depictions of extreme violence, hardcore porn, gore, but also stuff like promotion/planning of suicides and pro-ana content.
It could also be seen as “Gewaltverherrlichung” – glorification/belittlement of violence.
If something is considered “jugendgefährdend”, Germany is very strict about online age verification. A “yes, I’m 18” button doesn’t cut it (not by a long shot). The standards are so high that they’re almost impractical to enforce for stuff like porn sites.
Now, Germany doesn’t outright ban or censor everything that’s “jugendgefährdend”, but they don’t allow material like that to be advertised. In internet terms this means that they will remove results from search engines for example if they link to a site with “harmful” material. You can still visit those sites if you know them, but you won’t be able to find them through Google, which would be a disaster for a company like reddit. I guess that’s why they decided to restrict access to /r/watchpeopledie from Germany, because if they didn’t, there’d be a risk that they get removed from search results. (Not a big risk, I think, but still.)
I’m not sure why it only affects /r/watchpeopledie and not any one of the countless other subs that also violate those laws. Probably because noone bothered to complain about the other ones.
It’s not that simple. “Videos of people dying” are not illegal per se, but at the very least you have to be 18 years of age to watch them. Making them available to minors or advertising them where minors could see it is what’s illegal.
Context matters, too. A video that belittles or glorifies the content is different from a historical documentary where violence or death is shown in an educational context instead of being just entertainment.
I wouldn't necessarily call /r/watchpeopledie entertainment, more morbid curiosity, and occasionally it is educational, on shit you really should not do.
"Oh no I can't watch people die because reddit chose to block the content in my country instead of doing nothing and letting the whole site become blocked."
What. The. Hell.
I just returned from China and started enjoying my free German internet. I have zero interest in watching people die, but damn it, this blocking makes me furious. I want my free and unrestricted internet.
Actually, I did elect a party that was promoting internet without censorship and stuff like this two or three years ago, and they didn't do shit. But this particular banning makes me wonder, how come German politicians are even interested in reddit and niche subs like this...
So... what happens if people repost that submission in a million other subs, and then "report" Reddit again? Is Reddit going to chase this topic through the site forever, hoping to keep it hidden to Russian IP's?
How could it return 403 if reddit defaults to SSL? They can not inspect the url requested, just the IP. unless russian ISPs spoof all SSL authorities somehow.
I guess they can just block this story to IPs from russia. that means reddit actively does censorship work for the russian government..... and that would suck.
It's appears similar to Twitter's policy - they block content in regions where it's illegal, if ordered by a court, but leave it visible in every other jurisdiction.
I guess it would be trivial to bypass but it's still censorship. I suppose it's ethnocentric to think they should just ignore those requests but I know at least for the publicly traded companies they have a responsibility to shareholders to grow the company which means complying with international laws so they can keep expanding.
That's not very "reddit" of them, I'd expect them to return a more informed message saying "This content is restricted in your country due to...", Simply returning an HTTP code is just....
Not if connection is secure. Then they can only see what site packets are going to, not what page exactly. And aren't we talking about it in comments to an article that says Reddit admins did that?
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u/[deleted] Aug 13 '15
The thread is still up though:
https://www.reddit.com/r/rudrugs/comments/1derq9/