British ISPs Filtering Access To Wikipedia

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It seems that the powers that be in the UK have blocked access to the Wikipedia entry for the band the Scorpions because it shows the original album cover for Virgin Killers. Considering how controversial the cover has been for the last 25 years, using it instead of the replacement cover is beyond me.

The filtered content involves the controversial 1970s record album cover from the German band Scorpions that features a naked prepubescent girl. The album, Virgin Killer, was banned in many countries when it was released until a replacement cover was created.
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Where to begin. Britain's have lost most of their freedoms so why not censor their internet.
 
I hate how they did this and I REALLY hate agreeing to any form of censorship, but there is a picture of a naked little girl on the cover with a suggestive theme. I can see how people would look at it as child porn. Having said that the fact that ISP can filter content of any kind is cause to worry.
 
Good thing all those people afraid of slippery slopes in Brittan were clearly wrong.
 
Well, there is two sides to this. One is that they should not have used a picture of a young girl. If anyone posted an image of a young naked child online, they would clearly be in the wrong. YET, the gov filtering the web is also wrong.
Well, two wrongs don't make a right, right?
 
I'm British and I disagree strongly with what is going on here. While the picture doesn't evoke more than a "meh" from me, what's worrying is this is nothing more than an album cover. I bet you could get pictures of the same album cover from two dozen different websites within 10 minuites. Also, you could probably go into bookshops and record shops and obtain more pictures of this album without too much trouble. Why is it that just because it is on the Internet should it be censored?
 
Steve said:
Considering how controversial the cover has been for the last 25 years, using it instead of the replacement cover is beyond me.
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Wikipedia has a policy of not censoring itself unless legally obliged (and rightly so). The image is not illegal in the US, and so they would not censor it.

Wikipedia's goal is to provide an accurate account of the topic of the article. The fact that the original artwork was so controversial makes it even more important for it to be displayed in the article.
 
How that is not classified as official pedobear media is beyond me, and maybe a warning should be issued concerning that the cover is NSFW - hate to get an [H]'r in trouble. (first time I ever saw the cover and I immediately backed out.)
 
I think the Human race needs to take a step back and realize just how truly fucking stupid they're becoming. Me? Human? Hmmm... I seriously doubt it. This is just going off on a tangent I can't even comprehend...
 
RagingSamster said:
How that is not classified as official pedobear media is beyond me, and maybe a warning should be issued concerning that the cover is NSFW - hate to get an [H]'r in trouble. (first time I ever saw the cover and I immediately backed out.)
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Too late for me :p They recently started monitoring web usage at my work too.... hmmmm....
 
In reality this shows nothing more than if she were swimming in public. Many girls before puberty run around without shirts.

Anytime people get upset about a person of any age appearing the way they were born, nude, it is silly and twisted. If people don't like the human form then don't look at it.
 
Valset said:
I hate how they did this and I REALLY hate agreeing to any form of censorship, but there is a picture of a naked little girl on the cover with a suggestive theme. I can see how people would look at it as child porn. Having said that the fact that ISP can filter content of any kind is cause to worry.
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True, the picture is very controversial. However simply blocking Wikipedia (or part of it) won't stop people from viewing it. It's probably available on thousands of other websites. In order to block every picture of the cover they would have to create a huge blacklist, blocking many legit sites in the process.

Once they realize that they've got a green light for blocking content, they will extend that blacklist to include everything from piracy to blogs criticizing the government. Before you know it, the UK has gone totalitarian. That can happen very quickly once things are set in motion.
 
The primary contention is that other sites (Amazon) host the same image but aren't censored.
 
What does the IWF hope to gain (for anyone) by adding the article to their blacklist?
(From Wikipedia)

An officer of the Concerned Women for America, a conservative Christian advocacy group, commented, "By allowing that image to remain posted, Wikipedia is helping to further facilitate perversion and pedophilia."
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By that logic aren't images of the Holocaust (at any time) helping to further facilitate hate crimes and the inciting of violence between differing races or ideologies?
 
whrswoldo said:
Just curious, how is that possible?
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It's possible because we have something called the Consitution people keep forgetting about, specifically the first amendment, which limits the governments ability to infringe on our right of freedom of speech/expression. Artwork is a form of expression. There are many studios who will take photographs of of babies and kids, yes naked. How many Christian churches have paintings and statues depicting naked baby angels?

A little googling will find this interesting quote. "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric." U. S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall Harlan II.

The difference here, is from what I can tell from the article, the ISP's were blocking it. Private companies. I think MANY ISP's most likely have in their terms of service, maintain the right to restrict traffic. The servers, and the bandwidth are their property, and they can chosoe whatever they want to let cross it.

Just like Kyle here will ban, or delete posts, or move posts however he wants. These servers are his property to do with what he wants.

In the US, it would only be a question of, was there any government influence, or pressure put on the ISPs to do this?
 
Why censor Wikipedia? but not Amazon.co.uk?

Why censor the whole Wikipedia article which includes an explaination for the cover? Why not just censor the image?

Why do they make such a mess of the censorship that the page with the text is blocked, but any direct links to the image itself are not blocked?

Why censor a Scorpians Album but not the Nirvana one? (Nevermind has naked child on front)

Why are they not in the Tate and other art galleries censoring everything?

This is as bad as when the religious censors of the past ran around knocking all the knobs off of the male statues...


Censorship just means we learn how to bypass the censors with proxies and the like. Sensible education is needed, not kneejerk reactions. All this IWF (not government) banning of this image has managed to do is make the Scorpions Virgin Killer page on Wikipedia one of the most viewed over the weekend. As well as making sure that image has been distributed far and wide as this debate now rages across the internet.

Censoring clear, underage, sexual images is fine. But there needs to be a sensible line drawn otherwise we start banning innocent people.

Does this now imply that owners of the 1970's album can be arrested by the police for possesion of kiddie porn?

IMHO - stupid....
 
And so it begins.

The public blocking of one picture will probably make it the most visited page on Wiki whereas just leaving it or asking wiki to remove the image would have given it a lot less publicity.

One thing I have noticed though are a lot of websites now posting this news with comments posted by users that contain links to other wiki pages about the block that contain a copy of the image in question.
 
kdw1975 said:
In reality this shows nothing more than if she were swimming in public. Many girls before puberty run around without shirts.

Anytime people get upset about a person of any age appearing the way they were born, nude, it is silly and twisted. If people don't like the human form then don't look at it.
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with the word virgin killers on the top? sorry innocent this is not. this was pretty explicit
 
I think this would have the adverse effect since not everyone know about it. With the news of this hitting the tubes, I bet a lot more will be looking for it... Way to go for blocking a entry :rolleyes:
 
Backlash from Wikipedia:

Wikipedia said:
Under the Cleanfeed content blocking system, the block was accomplished by ISP proxy systems impersonating Wikipedia's servers, which had the side effects of degrading performance and left site administrators with little option but to block a significant portion of the UK from editing Wikipedia or creating accounts.
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emphasis my own.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Virgin_Killer
 
Joe Average said:
I think the Human race needs to take a step back and realize just how truly fucking stupid they're becoming. Me? Human? Hmmm... I seriously doubt it. This is just going off on a tangent I can't even comprehend...
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I agree with you 100% Where did we go wrong? I'm seriously debating not reading local/international news anymore - ignorance is bliss so they say.
 
Valset said:
with the word virgin killers on the top? sorry innocent this is not. this was pretty explicit
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Sorry yoda, but if you've heard the song or read the article, it's about how time + society kills all virgins by corrupting everything from birth onwards, not about murder or rape.
 
astyler said:
Sorry yoda, but if you've heard the song or read the article, it's about how time + society kills all virgins by corrupting everything from birth onwards, not about murder or rape.
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Ah - but astyler - you miss the point. One cannot let facts get in the way of a good rant and scream. :rolleyes: :D
 
astyler said:
Sorry yoda, but if you've heard the song or read the article, it's about how time + society kills all virgins by corrupting everything from birth onwards, not about murder or rape.
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not arguing the song, I have heard probably every song they did, but the cover by itself is, If you put it out on the street without any other context, not innocent. I could not expect the younger or older crowds to have heard the songs or even remember them (old age sucks) but this was just a stupid cover to have used, regardless of the artist intent. I never said that they meant it to be but I still can see how a LOT of people would view this as child porn.
 
JimmiG said:
Once they realize that they've got a green light for blocking content, they will extend that blacklist to include everything from piracy to blogs criticizing the government. Before you know it, the UK has gone totalitarian. That can happen very quickly once things are set in motion.
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I agree with this. This is the main issue here, if they can block sites like this, I don't see whats stopping them from start extending this internet censorship to anything they brand as inappropriate, and soon, the users internet usage will be dictated by the government as to what they can and cannot view online.:mad:
 
She isn't even wearing a veil. Mohammed would be offended. A female showing her face in public is the worst sort of pornography.
 
Another Brit here...

While I do agree that the album cover is tasteless. However I do not believe it should be censored, it goes against what the internet represents - Free Speech!

It's all very well blocking one image on a website (the article and thumbnail are still accessible), but now they have to block the image on google, amazon and many other sites. Then the next step is blocking/ modifying search results, from that stage in we are doomed...

I'll contact my local MP, but I am not holding my breath. Who would want to stand up against this in public for fear of appearing to be backing paedophiles?
 
What about Led Zeppelin's House of The Holy, the cover was a little risqué... A very good point was brought up, her genitals are covered, and a lot of girls run around in public without shirts on before puberty. I would agree the suggestive pose and album title present a prob, regardless of song content... The only thing I can say here is the art is tasteless.
 
Even funnier was their quote of realisation of what they had done...

"IWF's overriding objective is to minimise the availability of indecent images of children on the internet, however, on this occasion our efforts have had the opposite effect" :D
 
astyler said:
Sorry yoda, but if you've heard the song or read the article, it's about how time + society kills all virgins by corrupting everything from birth onwards, not about murder or rape.
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If everything is corrupted from birth onwards, wouldn't a picture of a newborn make even more sense though then?

I see a "posed" girl... if this picture is supposed to represent her last moment of virginity, well, looking at the image, it causes you to look right at her crotch...

It's certainly easy to misinterpret the message here, and another picture, while being less controversial for their point, would have made their point better...

Since someone else already brought up Nirvana's album cover, I think that would have made more sense... That was his last moment before corruption... (and nothing in that photo made me focus directly at his penis, either...)


I still do remember friends who aren't Nirvana fans going "WTF was that?" when seeing Nirvana's "Heart-Shaped Box" video with the fetus in the IV...


And, FWIW, I had no idea about this album cover controversy until today... Censorship working backwards again...

In the end, this album cover was done to help gain exposure for the band... Nothing less, and nothing more... Those who don't understand the message are going to probably misinterpret and possibly be offended, while those who do understand the message are going to realize a different image would make a lot more sense...

I think it's pretty cheap of Scorpions to go to this level, but "T&A" sells...


Lastly, censorship here worked pretty bad... My understanding is that people could still directly see the image, but weren't allowed to read a possible explanation of said image? Bizarre...
 
Where the fuck was the clarion call of child porn back in 1976? Oh wait, no one gave a shit about the album cover until it was dusted off and brought into the light of day once again. While I'm not a fan of the kind of imagery, I do have to say that the overall context of how bringing attention to something by the act of banning it makes peoples heads spin.
 
The difference here, is from what I can tell from the article, the ISP's were blocking it. Private companies. I think MANY ISP's most likely have in their terms of service, maintain the right to restrict traffic. The servers, and the bandwidth are their property, and they can chosoe whatever they want to let cross it.
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Hello it is government funded and was run by an elected official. No they were not elected for that spot but this is hardly self regulation.
 
BlueMeanie said:
Why censor a Scorpians Album but not the Nirvana one? (Nevermind has naked child on front)
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If a baby is titillating to someone, that person is very fucked up and we don't even want to think about it.

It's a societal norm that babies can be naked because they can't help themselves, but little girls should know better.

If a prepubescent girl is titillating to someone, they are within the boundaries of fucked-uped-ness that we can feel comfortable enough to point a finger.
 
Heres a question to consider, if that picture was randomly found on a forum somewhere on the net and you came across it, would you consider it child pornography?
 
Myg said:
Heres a question to consider, if that picture was randomly found on a forum somewhere on the net and you came across it, would you consider it child pornography?
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If i take a poo in a flower pot will it smell like roses? Seriously, the 'what if we remove the context' argument is just stupid. Why not just say, "what if you put this image on a pr0n site, is it then child pr0n and hence illiegal?" <-- Um, yes....duh.

The context means everything. People misunderstanding (or worse, being too lazy to try to understand) the context is what leads to retarded censorships in the first place.

And as for the artists being able to select a potentially less controversial image to make the same artistic statment, sure I'm sure they could have. However, most of the time an artist is going to aim for thier work to instigate some kind of thought &/or conversation with/between the people who experience the work. Using imagry (or whatever the medium may be) that falls into the gray area of a controversial topic is often a very effective way of doing this, & hence is quite common.
 
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