Rather unexpectedly the German government decided to dump a law that was long fought over: it introduced censoring child pornography websites rather than legally closing them down. This is a major success of the German movement for a free internet, and probably a also a result of current turmoils in the liberal-conservative government coalition - nobody expected that decision to be made at this point. Best Anne See also: http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,14968970,00.html *Deleting trumps blocking in fight against online child porn* After a year of using mixed tactics to combat the spread of child pornography online, politicians from the governing coalition in Germany have agreed that deleting child porn sites works better than simply blocking them. Leading figures in Germany's governing coalition agreed on Tuesday to permanently adopt a policy of deleting online child pornography sites from the internet rather than simply blocking them. A law from the previous coalition of Christian Democrats (CDU) and Social Democrats stated that Germany would fight the spread of child porn on the internet by blocking sites with pornographic content involving children. The current CDU-Free Democrats (FDP) coalition believes deleting the sites is a better way to solve the problem and had previously announced it would test out the policy over the course of one year. Now, the old policy is to be lifted and the new one implemented. The FDP was against merely blocking material because the party believed that could open the door to wider censorship on the internet. "Blocking online content is something that rightly elicits mistrust and challenges," said the FDP's Justice Minister Sabine Leutheusser-Schnarrenberger. She said the FDP had convinced the CDU that "deleting forbidden material like child-pornographic content is really the best and most effective way." -- http://about.me/annalist GPG http://pgp.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0x69411BDF annalist@jabber.ccc.de Privacybox: https://privacybox.de/annalist.msg _______________________________________________ liberationtech mailing list liberationtech@lists.stanford.edu Should you need to change your subscription options, please go to: https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech If you would like to receive a daily digest, click "yes" (once you click above) next to "would you like to receive list mail batched in a daily digest?" You will need the user name and password you receive from the list moderator in monthly reminders. Should you need immediate assistance, please contact the list moderator. Please don't forget to follow us on http://twitter.com/#!/Liberationtech ----- End forwarded message ----- -- Eugen* Leitl <a href="http://leitl.org">leitl</a> http://leitl.org ______________________________________________________________ ICBM: 48.07100, 11.36820 http://www.ativel.com http://postbiota.org 8B29F6BE: 099D 78BA 2FD3 B014 B08A 7779 75B0 2443 8B29 F6BE