[extropy-chat] No Joy in Mudville

Alejandro Dubrovsky alito at organicrobot.com
Thu Nov 11 07:52:53 UTC 2004


On Thu, 2004-11-11 at 11:36 +1030, Emlyn wrote:

> See Patrick's reply. For speech, things seem pretty good, maybe that's
> changing but it used to be the case at least that civil suits don't
> deal in the orders of magnitude of money changing hands that they do
> in the US, and the government rarely suppresses things; people jump up
> and down when they ban a movie or something of that ilk.

People jump up and down about a tiny minority of the films being banned
(ie whenever they ban something that got a prize in some foreign
competition, and even then most times the ban isn't lifted).  Most books
and films banned noone ever hears about.  Games are now being banned and
censored too (Manhunt in the first category, GTA 3 in the second).
X-rated material is, of course, illegal to sell in all states so
everyone has to buy from canberra, and don't try to host it anywhere in
australia.   Chunks of the internet can be ordered to be blocked off and
the list of blocked sites is itself censored.  And then there's the
Rabelais four case (ie not only can your stuff be banned but you can go
to jail for it too (but they'll let you off, cos they are all nice
people)) (btw, you have to pay for them to censor you)
That said, freedom of speech is not an issue here, mainly because people
don't care or are unaware.  It just happens that what most people want
to communicate is well within the set boundaries, and hosting porn in
the US is cheaper anyway.

alejandro





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