Intellectual Property Law

Photos and footage of the bloody riots and protests in Tibet continue to make their way onto the web, despite the Chinese authorities' best efforts to both spin the news and stifle reports emerging from the
region.

The Chinese police cracked down on Tibetan civilians and monks  over the week-end as peaceful protests turned violent. Apparently, the Tibetans (who've been culturally repressed for years) started rioting and beating anyone who is not Tibetan.   

The Chinese authorities have, predictably, blocked access to YouTube within China. And they've also been able to  selectively block television news reports of the events in the Tibetan Capital of Lhasa. 

Much of the reporting from Lhasa and elsewhere in Tibet comes from bloggers, tourists and activism organizations rather than traditional news outlets, which appear to have been blocked from the region.

Some enterprising bloggers are trying to evade China's Golden Shield by behaving like spammers -- deliberately mis-spelling words that China's censors have deemed troublesome and placed in its filtering system.

Thus Michael D. Manning, who runs the news blog "The Opposite End of China," has posted  photos of  protesting monks at  the Labrang Monastery in Xiahe in Tibet and captioned the photos  with the  word "Labr@ng."

The China Digital Times, based in Berkeley, California, has a rolling  slideshow of  pictures from around the web of  events  as they've  unfolded over the past several days in Tibet. 

Meanwhile, this translation of a local eye-witness account shows that the local authorities are pretty savvy users of communications technology themselves when it comes to public safety. The author of the piece received a couple of SMS messages from government officials telling them not to go outside on Friday because it wasn't safe.

Interestingly, a self-righteous YouTube editorial uploaded on Sunday, which adopts the typical Chinese rhetorical tactic of pointing to Western countries' less-than-honorable pasts when it comes to ethnic minorities, is gaining traction. It's already clocked up more than 400,000 views.   

The poster hilariously compares China to Canada, and doesn't see the apparent irony in the following statement: "China is NOT a single Ethnic nation, in fact 56 ethnic groups make up  China, including Han, Mongols, Koreans, Muslim, Tibetans, etc ... And we are all united as CHINESE, in other word, China is just as Multicultural as Canada, so DEAL WITH THAT!"

If you haven't already read these longer pieces on China's architecture of censorship, check out Wired magazine's piece on China's firewall and its ultimately doomed future, and The Atlantic's James Fallows' more recent piece, which is somewhat more pessimistic.

Update: The Free Tibet Campaign has these uploaded these grim pictures of the protests, which include pictures of what appear to be dead bodies, and columns of soldiers marching in. (Thanks, Brian.)

Update II: As one of the readers mentions below, there's no clear story about what is really happening in Tibet. So the pictures should be viewed with caution. But this is another argument for letting journalists get in to Tibet to cover the story.

(Full disclosure: I was married by a Tibetan monk.)

Image: International Campaign for Tibet.

Video: The Guardian