Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia
Encyclopedia
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation
(IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted
content on the English version
of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia
related to Scorpions'
1976 studio album Virgin Killer
, due to the presence of its controversial cover art
work, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux glass shatter obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under British law
which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed
.
The URL to the image's , which depicts the cover art, was also blacklisted; however thumbnails and the image itself remained accessible. The album cover had been deemed controversial at the time of its release, and was replaced in some markets with an alternate cover image featuring a photo of the band members. The IWF described the image as "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". Wikipedia's policies state that it does not censor content "that some readers consider objectionable or offensive, even exceedingly so," and as such only remove inappropriate content that is irrelevant, clearly vandalism
, or illegal under the laws of the US State of Florida
, where the site's servers are located. Wikipedia also removes content that violates its Biographies of living persons policy, or that violates other Wikipedia policies.
As well as the direct consequence of censoring the article and image for UK based readers of the English Wikipedia through the affected ISPs (a censoring that could be circumvented), and that the album cover was being made available unfiltered on other major sites including Amazon.co.uk (from which it was later removed), and available for sale in the UK, the action also had some indirect effects on Wikipedia, namely temporarily preventing all editors using said ISPs in the UK from contributing to any page of the encyclopaedia, and preventing anonymous edits from these ISPs while the URL remained on the blacklist. This was described by the IWF as unintended "collateral damage". This was due to the proxies used to access Wikipedia, as Wikipedia implements a blocking policy whereby contributors can be blocked if they vandalise the encyclopaedia. Therefore all vandalism coming from one ISP would be directed through one proxy—hence one IP—and all of the ISP's customers using that proxy would be barred from editing.
After invoking its appeals procedure and reviewing the situation, the IWF reversed their blacklisting of the page on 9 December 2008, and announced that they would not blacklist other copies of the image hosted outside the UK.
album Virgin Killer
was deemed controversial at the time of its release, featuring a young girl fully nude with a "smashed glass" effect covering her genitalia. The cover was replaced in some markets with an alternate cover image featuring a photo of the band members. RCA
refused to sell the controversial album cover in the United States. The cover was not the only Scorpions' cover which caused controversy however, as the covers for Taken by Force
and Lovedrive
have also caused controversy with their content.
In the United Kingdom, access to illegal content (such as child pornography
) was strictly self-regulated by individual internet service provider
s. This began when BT Group
introduced Cleanfeed
, a server-side filtering system
which uses data obtained from the Internet Watch Foundation
. The IWF is a Quango
organisation that operates a website where users can report web pages containing illegal or dubious content to be added to their blacklists. This was implemented in order to prevent users from accessing this material, since it is illegal to possess an indecent image of a child under the age of 18 per the Protection of Children Act
. British ISPs were later obligated by the government to implement filters for illegal content by the beginning of 2007.
On 5 December 2008 the Internet Watch Foundation
added the Wikipedia
URLs for the Virgin Killer article and the description page of the image to its blacklist. After the blacklisting, users of major UK ISPs
, including BT
, Vodafone
, Virgin Media
/Tesco.net
, Be
/O2, EasyNet/UK Online
/Sky Broadband
, Orange
, Demon
, and TalkTalk (Opal Telecom), were unable to access the content.
Sarah Robertson, director of communications for the IWF, said that the image was rated "1 on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is the least offensive". She described the picture as "erotic posing with no sexual activity". While the image itself has not been flagged as "illegal", IWF determined it to be a "potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18."
The IWF said they were first notified of the Wikipedia URL on Thursday, 4 December 2008. This followed the May 2008 reporting of the cover image on Wikipedia by US-based social conservative site WorldNetDaily
to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
. 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 paedophilia." EContent magazine subsequently reported that the discussion page associated with the article declared "Prior discussion has determined by broad consensus that the Virgin Killer cover will not be removed", and asserted that Wikipedia contributors "favour inclusion in all but the most extreme cases". However, according to The Guardian
because "the IWF doesn't talk to people outside of the UK they weren't able to appreciate what was going on." Internet security expert Richard Clayton explained that "We see this borderline stuff all the time; it's a no-win," before adding that the decision seems to have been based on taking the image out of context, particularly "given that you can go into HMV
and buy a copy on the high street". On 9 December 2008 the IWF reversed its blacklist of the Wikipedia pages on the basis of the "contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability".
visible to websites. However, as a result of ISPs using the IWF blacklist implemented through Cleanfeed
technology, traffic to Wikipedia via those affected ISPs was then routed through a small number of proxy server
s. This caused problems for users of the site. Since Wikipedia allows users to anonymously edit its encyclopaedia articles, these individuals are identified only through their IP addresses, which are used to selectively block users who vandalise the site or otherwise break its rules. The proxy filtering makes it impossible to uniquely distinguish users, and to prevent vandalism Wikipedia "instituted a blanket ban on anonymous edits from the six ISPs, which account for 95% of British residential internet users". This had the immediate effect of requiring nearly all registered users in the UK to request the lifting of on their accounts before they could edit again, and the de-facto permanent effect of barring any contribution from people without , who contribute merely under an IP address and not a user name.
The MediaWiki
software that Wikipedia runs on can interpret X-Forwarded-For
(XFF) headers, allowing Wikipedia to identify a user's main IP address rather than the proxy IP address, allowing the ability to block proxy users individually by their client's IP rather than the proxy server IP (avoiding the need to block the whole proxy due to the actions of a single user). However, none of the ISPs subscribing to this system pass X-Forwarded-For information to Wikipedia, having the impact of reversing the normal method of identification and blocking on Wikipedia. IP addresses assumed to be assigned to an individual person or organisation were assigned instead to millions of people and thousands of registered editors. Wikipedia servers saw them all as the IP of the proxy rather than each as the IP of their own machine.
Due to erroneous use of BGP
and other routing technology to redirect the connections to the filtering proxies, users of some networks were temporarily prevented from accessing or editing any content hosted by Wikimedia, a problem reminiscent of Pakistan's accidental blocking of YouTube for much of the world instead of only their own citizens.
, a non-profit organisation which supports the English Wikipedia, issued a press release about the blacklisting of their sites by the IWF stating that they had "no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world", and noting that not just the image but the article itself had been blocked.
On 9 December 2008, Jimmy Wales
, who holds the board-appointed "community founder" seat on the Wikimedia Board of Trustees
, told the UK's Channel 4 News
that he had briefly considered legal action. After the block had been removed, Mike Godwin
, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, stated "there is still plenty to be troubled by in the operations of the Internet Watch Foundation and its blacklist".
At the time of the incident Amazon US
were also displaying the image on their site and the IWF stated that it "might yet add Amazon US to its list of 'blocked' sites for hosting the picture"; however, Amazon subsequently took the decision to remove the image from their site.
In an impact study preparing a bill dealing with cybercrime
, the Government of France
listed the Virgin Killer block as an example of indiscriminate filtering.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
criticised the IWF's reasoning:
The IWF continues to assert that the image is indeed child porn, and asserts that the image would be blocked if it were on a British server.
Internet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
(IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted
Blacklist (computing)
In computing, a blacklist or block list is a basic access control mechanism that allows everyone access, except for the members of the black list . The opposite is a whitelist, which means allow nobody, except members of the white list...
content on the English version
English Wikipedia
The English Wikipedia is the English-language edition of the free online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Founded on 15 January 2001 and reaching three million articles by August 2009, it was the first edition of Wikipedia and remains the largest, with almost three times as many articles as the next...
of the online encyclopaedia Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
related to Scorpions'
Scorpions (band)
Scorpions are a heavy metal/hard rock band from Hannover, Germany, formed in 1965 by guitarist Rudolf Schenker, who is the band's only constant member. They are known for their 1980s rock anthem "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and many singles, such as "No One Like You", "Send Me an Angel", "Still...
1976 studio album Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976 and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude...
, due to the presence of its controversial cover art
Cover art
Cover art is the illustration or photograph on the outside of a published product such as a book , magazine, comic book, video game , DVD, CD, videotape, or music album. The art has a primarily commercial function, i.e...
work, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux glass shatter obscuring her genitalia. The image was deemed to be "potentially illegal content" under British law
Protection of Children Act 1978
The Protection of Children Act 1978 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.The Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament as a Private Member's Bill by Cyril Townsend in the 1977-1978 session of Parliament....
which forbids the possession or creation of indecent photographs of children. The IWF's blacklist are used in web filtering systems such as Cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
.
The URL to the image's , which depicts the cover art, was also blacklisted; however thumbnails and the image itself remained accessible. The album cover had been deemed controversial at the time of its release, and was replaced in some markets with an alternate cover image featuring a photo of the band members. The IWF described the image as "a potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18". Wikipedia's policies state that it does not censor content "that some readers consider objectionable or offensive, even exceedingly so," and as such only remove inappropriate content that is irrelevant, clearly vandalism
Vandalism
Vandalism is the behaviour attributed originally to the Vandals, by the Romans, in respect of culture: ruthless destruction or spoiling of anything beautiful or venerable...
, or illegal under the laws of the US State of Florida
Florida
Florida is a state in the southeastern United States, located on the nation's Atlantic and Gulf coasts. It is bordered to the west by the Gulf of Mexico, to the north by Alabama and Georgia and to the east by the Atlantic Ocean. With a population of 18,801,310 as measured by the 2010 census, it...
, where the site's servers are located. Wikipedia also removes content that violates its Biographies of living persons policy, or that violates other Wikipedia policies.
As well as the direct consequence of censoring the article and image for UK based readers of the English Wikipedia through the affected ISPs (a censoring that could be circumvented), and that the album cover was being made available unfiltered on other major sites including Amazon.co.uk (from which it was later removed), and available for sale in the UK, the action also had some indirect effects on Wikipedia, namely temporarily preventing all editors using said ISPs in the UK from contributing to any page of the encyclopaedia, and preventing anonymous edits from these ISPs while the URL remained on the blacklist. This was described by the IWF as unintended "collateral damage". This was due to the proxies used to access Wikipedia, as Wikipedia implements a blocking policy whereby contributors can be blocked if they vandalise the encyclopaedia. Therefore all vandalism coming from one ISP would be directed through one proxy—hence one IP—and all of the ISP's customers using that proxy would be barred from editing.
After invoking its appeals procedure and reviewing the situation, the IWF reversed their blacklisting of the page on 9 December 2008, and announced that they would not blacklist other copies of the image hosted outside the UK.
Background
The album art of the Scorpions'Scorpions (band)
Scorpions are a heavy metal/hard rock band from Hannover, Germany, formed in 1965 by guitarist Rudolf Schenker, who is the band's only constant member. They are known for their 1980s rock anthem "Rock You Like a Hurricane" and many singles, such as "No One Like You", "Send Me an Angel", "Still...
album Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer
Virgin Killer is the fourth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions. It was released in 1976 and was the first album of the band to attract attention outside Europe. The title is described as being a reference to time as the killer of innocence. The original cover featured a nude...
was deemed controversial at the time of its release, featuring a young girl fully nude with a "smashed glass" effect covering her genitalia. The cover was replaced in some markets with an alternate cover image featuring a photo of the band members. RCA
RCA
RCA Corporation, founded as the Radio Corporation of America, was an American electronics company in existence from 1919 to 1986. The RCA trademark is currently owned by the French conglomerate Technicolor SA through RCA Trademark Management S.A., a company owned by Technicolor...
refused to sell the controversial album cover in the United States. The cover was not the only Scorpions' cover which caused controversy however, as the covers for Taken by Force
Taken by Force
Note that most versions of this album feature an edited version of 'The Sails of Charon'. The editing removes a "psychedelic" like sound-effects introduction. The intro doesn't actually contain any music performed by the band...
and Lovedrive
Lovedrive
Lovedrive is the sixth studio album by the German heavy metal band Scorpions, released in 1979. Lovedrive was a major evolution of the band's sound, which exhibited their "classic style" that would be later developed over their next few albums. Michael Schenker, younger brother of rhythm guitarist...
have also caused controversy with their content.
In the United Kingdom, access to illegal content (such as child pornography
Child pornography
Child pornography refers to images or films and, in some cases, writings depicting sexually explicit activities involving a child...
) was strictly self-regulated by individual internet service provider
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
s. This began when BT Group
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
introduced Cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
, a server-side filtering system
Content-control software
Content-control software, also known as censorware or web filtering software, is a term for software designed and optimized for controlling what content is permitted to a reader, especially when it is used to restrict material delivered over the Web...
which uses data obtained from the Internet Watch Foundation
Internet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
. The IWF is a Quango
Quango
Quango or qango is an acronym used notably in the United Kingdom, Ireland and elsewhere to label an organisation to which government has devolved power...
organisation that operates a website where users can report web pages containing illegal or dubious content to be added to their blacklists. This was implemented in order to prevent users from accessing this material, since it is illegal to possess an indecent image of a child under the age of 18 per the Protection of Children Act
Protection of Children Act 1978
The Protection of Children Act 1978 is an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom.The Protection of Children Bill was put before Parliament as a Private Member's Bill by Cyril Townsend in the 1977-1978 session of Parliament....
. British ISPs were later obligated by the government to implement filters for illegal content by the beginning of 2007.
Addition to IWF blacklist
Internet Watch Foundation
The Internet Watch Foundation is a non-governmental charitable body based in the United Kingdom. It states that its remit is "to minimise the availability of 'potentially criminal' Internet content, specifically images of child sexual abuse hosted anywhere, and criminally obscene adult content in...
added the Wikipedia
Wikipedia
Wikipedia is a free, web-based, collaborative, multilingual encyclopedia project supported by the non-profit Wikimedia Foundation. Its 20 million articles have been written collaboratively by volunteers around the world. Almost all of its articles can be edited by anyone with access to the site,...
URLs for the Virgin Killer article and the description page of the image to its blacklist. After the blacklisting, users of major UK ISPs
Internet service provider
An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...
, including BT
BT Group
BT Group plc is a global telecommunications services company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is one of the largest telecommunications services companies in the world and has operations in more than 170 countries. Through its BT Global Services division it is a major supplier of...
, Vodafone
Vodafone
Vodafone Group Plc is a global telecommunications company headquartered in London, United Kingdom. It is the world's largest mobile telecommunications company measured by revenues and the world's second-largest measured by subscribers , with around 341 million proportionate subscribers as of...
, Virgin Media
Virgin Media
Virgin Media Inc. is a company which provides fixed and mobile telephone, television and broadband internet services to businesses and consumers in the United Kingdom...
/Tesco.net
Tesco
Tesco plc is a global grocery and general merchandise retailer headquartered in Cheshunt, United Kingdom. It is the third-largest retailer in the world measured by revenues and the second-largest measured by profits...
, Be
Be Unlimited
BE Un Limited is an Internet service provider in the United Kingdom with the trading names "Be There", BE Unlimited or simply BE. It is part of Spanish group Telefónica Europe, who also own O2....
/O2, EasyNet/UK Online
UK Online
UK Online was a consumer Internet service provider that operated within the UK, and began as a dial-up provider in 1994. Network provider Easynet acquired the company in 1996....
/Sky Broadband
Sky Broadband
Sky Broadband is an internet service provider for Sky customers.As of March 2008 Sky claims to have reached 1.428 million customers, and unbundled 1,179 exchanges, covering 70% of the United Kingdom. In October 2007, Sky reached the 1 million mark in terms of customer numbers, and claim to be...
, Orange
Orange United Kingdom
Orange is a mobile network operator and internet service provider in the United Kingdom, which launched in 1994. It was once a constituent of the FTSE 100 Index but was purchased by France Télécom in 2000, which then adopted the Orange brand for all its other mobile communications activities...
, Demon
Demon Internet
Demon Internet is a British Internet Service Provider. It was one of the UK's earliest ISPs, especially targeting the "dialup" audience. It started on 1 June 1992 from an idea posted on CIX by Cliff Stanford of Demon Systems Ltd. The branch in the Netherlands started in 1996, and was sold to KPN...
, and TalkTalk (Opal Telecom), were unable to access the content.
Sarah Robertson, director of communications for the IWF, said that the image was rated "1 on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is the least offensive". She described the picture as "erotic posing with no sexual activity". While the image itself has not been flagged as "illegal", IWF determined it to be a "potentially illegal indecent image of a child under the age of 18."
The IWF said they were first notified of the Wikipedia URL on Thursday, 4 December 2008. This followed the May 2008 reporting of the cover image on Wikipedia by US-based social conservative site WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily
WorldNetDaily is an American web site that publishes news and associated content from a U.S. conservative perspective. It was founded in May 1997 by Joseph Farah with the stated intent of "exposing wrongdoing, corruption and abuse of power" and is headquartered in Washington, D.C.-History:In...
to the Federal Bureau of Investigation
Federal Bureau of Investigation
The Federal Bureau of Investigation is an agency of the United States Department of Justice that serves as both a federal criminal investigative body and an internal intelligence agency . The FBI has investigative jurisdiction over violations of more than 200 categories of federal crime...
. An officer of the Concerned Women for America
Concerned Women for America
Concerned Women for America is a conservative Christian public policy group active in the United States best known for its stance against abortion...
, a conservative Christian advocacy group, commented, "By allowing that image to remain posted, Wikipedia is helping to further facilitate perversion and paedophilia." EContent magazine subsequently reported that the discussion page associated with the article declared "Prior discussion has determined by broad consensus that the Virgin Killer cover will not be removed", and asserted that Wikipedia contributors "favour inclusion in all but the most extreme cases". However, according to The Guardian
The Guardian
The Guardian, formerly known as The Manchester Guardian , is a British national daily newspaper in the Berliner format...
because "the IWF doesn't talk to people outside of the UK they weren't able to appreciate what was going on." Internet security expert Richard Clayton explained that "We see this borderline stuff all the time; it's a no-win," before adding that the decision seems to have been based on taking the image out of context, particularly "given that you can go into HMV
HMV Group
HMV is a British global entertainment retail chain and is the largest of its kind in the United Kingdom and Ireland. The company also operates in Hong Kong and Singapore. It is listed on the London Stock Exchange and is a constituent of the FTSE Fledgling Index...
and buy a copy on the high street". On 9 December 2008 the IWF reversed its blacklist of the Wikipedia pages on the basis of the "contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability".
Effects on Wikipedia
The blacklisting of Virgin Killer also caused other inadvertent issues for Wikipedia users in the United Kingdom. Usually most Internet users have a unique IP addressIP address
An Internet Protocol address is a numerical label assigned to each device participating in a computer network that uses the Internet Protocol for communication. An IP address serves two principal functions: host or network interface identification and location addressing...
visible to websites. However, as a result of ISPs using the IWF blacklist implemented through Cleanfeed
Cleanfeed (content blocking system)
Cleanfeed is the name given to privately administered ISP level content filtering systems operating in the United Kingdom and Canada. It is also the name of a proposed mandatory Australian ISP level content filtering system which is undergoing testing...
technology, traffic to Wikipedia via those affected ISPs was then routed through a small number of proxy server
Proxy server
In computer networks, a proxy server is a server that acts as an intermediary for requests from clients seeking resources from other servers. A client connects to the proxy server, requesting some service, such as a file, connection, web page, or other resource available from a different server...
s. This caused problems for users of the site. Since Wikipedia allows users to anonymously edit its encyclopaedia articles, these individuals are identified only through their IP addresses, which are used to selectively block users who vandalise the site or otherwise break its rules. The proxy filtering makes it impossible to uniquely distinguish users, and to prevent vandalism Wikipedia "instituted a blanket ban on anonymous edits from the six ISPs, which account for 95% of British residential internet users". This had the immediate effect of requiring nearly all registered users in the UK to request the lifting of on their accounts before they could edit again, and the de-facto permanent effect of barring any contribution from people without , who contribute merely under an IP address and not a user name.
The MediaWiki
MediaWiki
MediaWiki is a popular free web-based wiki software application. Developed by the Wikimedia Foundation, it is used to run all of its projects, including Wikipedia, Wiktionary and Wikinews. Numerous other wikis around the world also use it to power their websites...
software that Wikipedia runs on can interpret X-Forwarded-For
X-Forwarded-For
The X-Forwarded-For HTTP header field is a de facto standard for identifying the originating IP address of a client connecting to a web server through an HTTP proxy or load balancer. This is an HTTP request header which was introduced by the Squid caching proxy server's developers...
(XFF) headers, allowing Wikipedia to identify a user's main IP address rather than the proxy IP address, allowing the ability to block proxy users individually by their client's IP rather than the proxy server IP (avoiding the need to block the whole proxy due to the actions of a single user). However, none of the ISPs subscribing to this system pass X-Forwarded-For information to Wikipedia, having the impact of reversing the normal method of identification and blocking on Wikipedia. IP addresses assumed to be assigned to an individual person or organisation were assigned instead to millions of people and thousands of registered editors. Wikipedia servers saw them all as the IP of the proxy rather than each as the IP of their own machine.
Due to erroneous use of BGP
Border Gateway Protocol
The Border Gateway Protocol is the protocol backing the core routing decisions on the Internet. It maintains a table of IP networks or 'prefixes' which designate network reachability among autonomous systems . It is described as a path vector protocol...
and other routing technology to redirect the connections to the filtering proxies, users of some networks were temporarily prevented from accessing or editing any content hosted by Wikimedia, a problem reminiscent of Pakistan's accidental blocking of YouTube for much of the world instead of only their own citizens.
Response by the Wikimedia Foundation
On 7 December 2008, the Wikimedia FoundationWikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc. is an American non-profit charitable organization headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States, and organized under the laws of the state of Florida, where it was initially based...
, a non-profit organisation which supports the English Wikipedia, issued a press release about the blacklisting of their sites by the IWF stating that they had "no reason to believe the article, or the image contained in the article, has been held to be illegal in any jurisdiction anywhere in the world", and noting that not just the image but the article itself had been blocked.
On 9 December 2008, Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Wales
Jimmy Donal "Jimbo" Wales is an American Internet entrepreneur best known as a co-founder and promoter of the online non-profit encyclopedia Wikipedia and the Wikia company....
, who holds the board-appointed "community founder" seat on the Wikimedia Board of Trustees
Trustee
Trustee is a legal term which, in its broadest sense, can refer to any person who holds property, authority, or a position of trust or responsibility for the benefit of another...
, told the UK's Channel 4 News
Channel 4 News
Channel 4 News is the news division of British television broadcaster Channel 4. It is produced by ITN, and has been in operation since the broadcaster's launch in 1982.-Channel 4 News:...
that he had briefly considered legal action. After the block had been removed, Mike Godwin
Mike Godwin
Michael Wayne Godwin is an American attorney and author. He was the first staff counsel of the Electronic Frontier Foundation , and the creator of the Internet adage Godwin's Law of Nazi Analogies. From July 2007 to October 2010, he was general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation...
, general counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, stated "there is still plenty to be troubled by in the operations of the Internet Watch Foundation and its blacklist".
Retraction of content block
On 9 December 2008, the IWF rescinded the block, The image description page had 530,000 page views under its main URL, compared with mostly less than 10,000 per month before.At the time of the incident Amazon US
Amazon.com
Amazon.com, Inc. is a multinational electronic commerce company headquartered in Seattle, Washington, United States. It is the world's largest online retailer. Amazon has separate websites for the following countries: United States, Canada, United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Japan, and...
were also displaying the image on their site and the IWF stated that it "might yet add Amazon US to its list of 'blocked' sites for hosting the picture"; however, Amazon subsequently took the decision to remove the image from their site.
In an impact study preparing a bill dealing with cybercrime
CyberCrime
CyberCrime was an innovative, weekly America television program on TechTV that focused on the dangers facing computer users. Filmed in San Francisco, California, the show was hosted by Alex Wellen and Jennifer London...
, the Government of France
Government of France
The government of the French Republic is a semi-presidential system determined by the French Constitution of the fifth Republic. The nation declares itself to be an "indivisible, secular, democratic, and social Republic"...
listed the Virgin Killer block as an example of indiscriminate filtering.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation
Electronic Frontier Foundation
The Electronic Frontier Foundation is an international non-profit digital rights advocacy and legal organization based in the United States...
criticised the IWF's reasoning:
The IWF continues to assert that the image is indeed child porn, and asserts that the image would be blocked if it were on a British server.
External links
- Internet Watch Foundation
- Internal discussion on Wikipedia discussing the IWF actions
- Wikipedia's list of media coverage of incident
- Clayton, Richard: Technical aspects of the censoring of Wikipedia (Light Blue Touchpaper – Security Research, Computer Laboratory, University of Cambridge)