16 Jul 10 | Digital Freedom, Index Index, minipost
The Chinese authorities have ordered 122 websites to remove all traces of pornography or lewd content from their sites or face censorship and prosecution. The content prohibited includes pornographic fiction available for online reading or download. Chinese censorship has been steadily growing and recently hit the headlines over clashes with internet giant Google.
09 Jul 10 | Index Index, minipost, News and features
China confirms it has renewed Google’s internet licence. Making the announcement on Google’s company blog, chief legal officer David Drummond said:
We are very pleased that the government has renewed our ICP licence and we look forward to continuing to provide web search and local products to our users in China.
Google’s relationship with China has been strained since it announced in March that it would no longer censor its search services in China. Instead it began to redirect Chinese users to Google’s unfiltered Hong Kong site. In a bid to have its licence renewed last month the company redesigned its google.cn landing page. Instead of automatically redirecting them to the Hong Kong site, it now offers them a link to google.hk instead. Google chief legal officer David Drummond defended the change in direction saying that “Without an ICP licence, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.”
29 Jun 10 | Index Index, minipost
Google is to adopt a ‘new approach’ in China after officials threatened to revoke its Internet Content Provider (ICP) licence. In January, the internet giant declared that it would no longer censor search engine results as required by Chinese law and since March, has redirected mainland users of google.cn to the unfiltered google.hk site. However the new approach, announced a day before its ICP license expires, directs users of google.cn to a “landing page” with a link to google.hk. Google chief legal officer David Drummond defended the change in direction highlighting that “Without an ICP licence, we can’t operate a commercial website like Google.cn—so Google would effectively go dark in China.” However, it is unclear whether this new arrangement will be accepted by Chinese authorities.
25 Jun 10 | Index Index, minipost
On 23 June, Viacom’s $1bn lawsuit against YouTube was thrown out by a US judge. The entertainment company had raised the claim citing widespread copyright infringement by the Google owned video hosting site. However, in his summary judgment, District Judge Louis Stanton held that Youtube was protected by the “safe provision” in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act because they had swiftly removed all offending videos when prompted.
