International Law

Uncensored blogging

TorrentFreak reports that The Pirate Bay is launching an uncensored blogging service:

In their ever continuing battle to free the Internet, The Pirate Bay has now launched an uncensored blogging service, called Baywords. The service is intended to be a safe haven for bloggers who want to be able to write whatever they want, without being afraid to get shut down by their blog host.

The Pirate Bay is known for defending people?s right to freedom of speech on the Internet, and this is exactly what motivated them to start this new blogging service.

Brokep, one of the co-founders of the site, told TorrentFreak that the idea to start a blogging service came up when the weblog of one of his friends was taken down from Wordpress recently, for linking to copyrighted material.

This, of course, goes against the ?uncensored web? philosophy of The Pirate Bay team, and they didn?t hesitate to start their own blogging service, Baywords, using Wordpress as their blogging engine.

On the frontpage of the newly launched service Brokep writes: ?Many blogs are being shut down for uncomfortable thoughts and ideas. We will not do that. Our goal is to protect freedom of speech and your thoughts. As long as you don?t break any Swedish laws in your blog, we will defend it?.

In a response, Matt Mullenweg from WordPress told TorrentFreak that he supports Pirate Bay?s Baywords, but he assured us that Wordpress.com would never take down a blog for posting deviating thoughts or ideas.

?WordPress.com supports free speech and doesn?t shut people down for ?uncomfortable thoughts and ideas?, in fact we?re blocked in several countries because of that. However as a US-based companies we must comply with US laws, which means if the primary purpose of a blog is distributing illegal material it?s not a good fit for WordPress.com,? Matt said.

Baywords is currently working on expanding the feature list to include support for domain redirects and improved stats. The service is ad-free for now, but Brokep told TorrentFreak that there will be ads blended into the blog design later, to cover the expenses.

Read more here.

Full post as published by Freedom to Differ on April 17, 2008 (boomark / email).