Legal Research

UK ISP Service Bans, Un-Bans Wikipedia Page

By John Gregory

Last week Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a collaborative service of Britain?s Internet Service Providers, banned a page of Wikipedia that contained a picture of a record album cover (in the UK called the ?sleeve?) from 1976. The picture showed a young girl, about 10 perhaps, naked, in a sexually suggestive pose.

The ban was done by putting the page on a blacklist that IWF updates twice a day to help British ISPs avoid making potentially illegal images available.

An unintended consequence of the ban was to prevent any British internet users from editing any page on Wikipedia. This consequence comes from the way Wikipedia is set up, to allow its operators to control who has the right to edit its pages (to keep the known loonies out.)

Wikipedia cried loud and long about censorship, joined by many net users. Recently IWF lifted the ban, saying that the image has been around for so long it is more or less unbannable.

Here is an editorial from a senior communications lawyer, and editor of the newsletter Out-Law.com published by a British law firm, saying that the ban should not have been lifted. And here is his earlier piece defending the ban while it was still in effect.

He points out that our laws (and ours are not substantially different from the UK?s) prevent a lot of content from being published, whether because it is criminal or defamatory or infringing of IP or whatever. The question is how best to manage this to minimize over-broad restrictions. He also points out that it is hypocritical of Wikimedia Foundation to criticise British censorship when the principal harmful effect of that censorship is caused by Wikimedia?s own measures to censor its editors.

So: is he right?

One of his points is that the British government made it clear that if the ISPs did not get their own act together to do this filtering, the government would do it for them.

At the same time Australian ISPs have been resisting a government plan to make them aggressively filter content. The usual target, in Australia as in the UK, is child pornography – but do these efforts stop there, or is there function creep?. to other criminal content, to offensive content, to undesirable speech? That story is here (from Internet Law News this morning).

Do we need something like IWF for ISPs in Canada? Is CyberTip it?

If not, then what? Is there a collective remedy of some other kind?

Full post as published by Slaw.ca on December 12, 2008 (boomark / email).