Premier League orders censorship of BBC and other legit sites, blasts ISPs for correcting their error

boing
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Do you mind if I define censorship as broadly as possible?

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How do you send ISP such notices ? Could it be scripted, to send spoofed request that include IPs from all over the net ?

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It isn’t against censorware. The Premier League is the agency which included the blocks on the censor list. The software is merely the agency by which the libel is published. Sort of like you can’t sue the newspaper delivery boy, but you can sue the newspaper.

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Good idea, but censorship would then happen using pseudonyms to keep the companies clear:

  • Censored by Tpl Ltd.

  • Censored by Dunsworth & Dunsworth Baristers on behalf of a client.

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Doesn’t UK libel law give the companies who got censored by collateral damage from the Premier League’s accusations of evil in their IP address space some recourse? There seems to be clear damage to their business as well as to their reputations as a result of the League’s actions.

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Only as much as I mind any word being inappropriately mis-used.

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Even without the UK’s libel laws (which are apparently quite extreme) this is reason for court action is pretty much any jurisdiction. Maybe you can’t sue them for calling you a criminal, but you can sure sue them for blocking access to your site through their negligence. Presumably since you have a website, it is of some value to you to have it, and blocking access to it is harming you.

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The problem is that traditional definitions of censorship rely on notions of human agency. Traditional censorship could be traced back to officials overruling the judgement of publishers. But a buggy algorithm?

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I still would like you to actually define censorship! Go on, humour me.

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The use of state or monopolistic authority, rather than editorial discretion, to suppress publication and dissemination of information.

31

Thanks. But that’s not actually correct, by any number of instances of the actual accepted definition I could cite, which was the same problem I had with Cory’s needlessly inflamatory use in the headline.

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You could cite? Why don’t you, then?

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Okay, so let’s go with Oxford and Meriam Webster who seem to agree. Censorship is the work of a censor. A censor an official who examines materials about to be published to determine if they have unacceptable content.

So, if you are arguing that this does not fit the dictionary definition of censorship then I agree entirely. There is no person who is a censor who is responsible for this, the materials were already published before they were blocked by law, and they were not even examined to see if they were unacceptable (which was a big part of the problem).

Great, we can look things up in the dictionary. Instead of trying to argue about definitions, though, perhaps you could explain why invoking the idea of “censorship” as a metaphor or in a contemporary understanding is unfair or inflammatory. After all, the definition of censorship does not include things like the government blocking access to any website that was created by their political opponents since they would have to find out the website was created by their opponent after the fact and they are censoring based on the author not based on the content.

If you honestly just don’t understand why someone would feel this is analogous to censorship, that’s fine. If you feel you understand why people would say that but you feel it is unwarranted, you could try to explain that. Simply flat out stating that it is inappropriate and referring back to word definitions doesn’t really illustrate any point other than that you have an inappropriate fixation with dictionaries.

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