Should governments censor material on the internet? [ENDS 27/06/2010]

as other people have said, no, we shouldnt be censoring anything specifically on the web. obviously the internet is just a medium for spreading child porn and should be treated the same way as off the internet, we track down the people who made it instead of just blocking it and thinking the problem is gone.

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Originally Posted by GommeInc

Not sure what to make on illegal downloading though - the supplier is wrong, but the one downloading may not neccesarily be evil, even though they have the choice :/

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yeah this is a difficult issue. the problem is that our laws of capitalism aren't applicable to current times where a lot of our products are intellectual, nonphysical property which we assign arbitrary value. theres obviously illegal activities but its hard to point blame at anything other than the concept of the internet.

i see what a lot of people are saying where it's best to try track down the cretins who makes these disturbing videos and such, but don't you think there should at least be an effort to filter out such videos, otherwise they'll catch like wildfire? i'm not arguing or anything 'cos in principle i agree you attack the core, but surely one must attempt to tame the beast as well?

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Originally Posted by Cod

i see what a lot of people are saying where it's best to try track down the cretins who makes these disturbing videos and such, but don't you think there should at least be an effort to filter out such videos, otherwise they'll catch like wildfire? i'm not arguing or anything 'cos in principle i agree you attack the core, but surely one must attempt to tame the beast as well?

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The beast it the person/s making the video, the videos are probably copied thousands of times over and thus you can never eradicate them, as for spreading like wildfire, well if a pedophile wants to watch child porn - he will watch child porn. The rest of us I expect dont have that sort of thing within us, so its not likely for us to all of a sudden to become attracted to children being abused.

No.
I believe everyone in the world should be allowed to be thereselves.
What the governments SHOULD CENSOR, are pro-terrorism groups (groups that support terrorism), webpages that support Child Pornography, and torture of teenage human beings, and any other people.
All of the sites the government should censor, which are mentioned above, shouldn't be on the internet anyway, as children, such as me, a teenage boy at the age of 13, could be going onto these sites and become addicted to them, Child Pornography is disgusting, and anyone watching it should rot in prison just as much as the perverted males and females at that matter, who are sexually assulting those children.

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Originally Posted by -:Undertaker:-

The beast it the person/s making the video, the videos are probably copied thousands of times over and thus you can never eradicate them, as for spreading like wildfire, well if a pedophile wants to watch child porn - he will watch child porn. The rest of us I expect dont have that sort of thing within us, so its not likely for us to all of a sudden to become attracted to children being abused.

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it was a bloody metaphor! the person creating them created the beast, nevermind argh. it's like things such as /b/ on 4chan. a lot of people don't use that for child porn but are subjective to it, that's there the fight needs to start.

I dont think government should intervene with any internet goings on. from the recent digital economy act i remember a MP who voted for the act say something like an IP address is Intellectual Property address.

I strongly disagree that people should be sued by companies for illegal downloading. Companies should learn from illegal downloading and realise that the prices are too high for most people. mainly students who need money for food and stuff. they illegally download based on the fact its nearly £1 per song, £1 in student language is alot if you think about it, My old teacher said when he was in university he didnt have a job or any form of income because he was a full time student. he just scraped by each week.

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Originally Posted by RedStratocas

yeah this is a difficult issue. the problem is that our laws of capitalism aren't applicable to current times where a lot of our products are intellectual, nonphysical property which we assign arbitrary value. theres obviously illegal activities but its hard to point blame at anything other than the concept of the internet.

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The argument for many illegal downloaders is the price of these products. I suppose that may fit into your comment about our laws of capitalism aren't applicable to current times too, seeing as Photoshop is an impressive software suite, the price just isn't justifiable seeing as it isn't anything physical or touchable. Music is something like 79p a track, which to some is quite a when the only savings are made when you buy a whole album, and you can argue that it is unethical for a company to ask for you to buy a whole album to experience cheaper songs, when not everyone enjoys many tracks from the same artist, but just one or two songs. A film is something like £3.99 to download, yet that lasts for longer (when watched).

It's a tricky discussion as it verges on opinion, what matters is the opinion of the majority.

As far as I can tell, the people who perform these songs do not really mind, as they make more money out of concerts and shows than from music sales. The only ones moaning seem to be the music companies :/

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Originally Posted by GommeInc

The argument for many illegal downloaders is the price of these products. I suppose that may fit into your comment about our laws of capitalism aren't applicable to current times too, seeing as Photoshop is an impressive software suite, the price just isn't justifiable seeing as it isn't anything physical or touchable. Music is something like 79p a track, which to some is quite a when the only savings are made when you buy a whole album, and you can argue that it is unethical for a company to ask for you to buy a whole album to experience cheaper songs, when not everyone enjoys many tracks from the same artist, but just one or two songs. A film is something like £3.99 to download, yet that lasts for longer (when watched).

It's a tricky discussion as it verges on opinion, what matters is the opinion of the majority.

As far as I can tell, the people who perform these songs do not really mind, as they make more money out of concerts and shows than from music sales. The only ones moaning seem to be the music companies :/

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thats why those "anti-movie piracy" ads dont make sense; they say "you wouldnt steal a car, would you?!" but thats completely different. A car is physical property, and when you take it, it is no longer in someone elses possession. movies and music on the other hand, can be duplicated with no effort and passed to as many people as pleased with no cost to anyone. theres no guilt. except for the case of movies, unfortunately they do make the majority of their money at the theaters and that would severely undercut the industry if people downladed in the same quantities as they do music.

the music industry works opposite how it used to. bands used to make their money off albums, and record companies used to send the bands out on their dime to perform in order to support it. now, record companies get a percentage of their band's live show earnings, and bands barely make a nickle off their albums. which is why, like you said, bands (especially younger ones) dont care about album sales anymore.

that whole part about our laws of capitalism isnt supposed to make me seem like a communist, but progressing technology is giving us circumstances where our normal rules dont apply, and its only going to get worse with newspapers, television and books all going digital. we are going to have to figure out a way to make money and industry of products that only have intellectual value.

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Originally Posted by RedStratocas

thats why those "anti-movie piracy" ads dont make sense; they say "you wouldnt steal a car, would you?!" but thats completely different. A car is physical property, and when you take it, it is no longer in someone elses possession. movies and music on the other hand, can be duplicated with no effort and passed to as many people as pleased with no cost to anyone. theres no guilt. except for the case of movies, unfortunately they do make the majority of their money at the theaters and that would severely undercut the industry if people downladed in the same quantities as they do music.

the music industry works opposite how it used to. bands used to make their money off albums, and record companies used to send the bands out on their dime to perform in order to support it. now, record companies get a percentage of their band's live show earnings, and bands barely make a nickle off their albums. which is why, like you said, bands (especially younger ones) dont care about album sales anymore.

that whole part about our laws of capitalism isnt supposed to make me seem like a communist, but progressing technology is giving us circumstances where our normal rules dont apply, and its only going to get worse with newspapers, television and books all going digital. we are going to have to figure out a way to make money and industry of products that only have intellectual value.

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Indeed, it's quite shocking how easy it is to reproduce music. There is literally no effort and there never will be because it would be unfair of digital industries to tackle the problem by hijacking OS makers and getting them to cut off simple commands like copy and paste, which is all it takes to duplicate a file. It's why the old record players and vinyl discs used to be so useful, they couldn't be duplicated becase they were, in essense, physical property. Only you can have this one item and you cannot duplicate it as it would be impossible to. CDs and DVDs, were designed for convenience to make hard copies of our non-physical items like back-ups or converting video cassettes to DVD to preserve them for the future, it just has its dark side where you can copy over duplicated music or video files :P It's interesting how the future has changed in such a small amount of time, where the record/vinyl (whatever you want to call it) was the ultimate way to tackle piracy. The video cassette was part-way there, some videos could be copied but some couldn't, you had to buy a seperate item rather than use a PC like we do today :/

It's hard to point blame at someone. To a degree, the record companies are greedy, but then the individual is the baddie in all this when they start to download files. However, I know of a lot of people who will download a file without paying for it as a sort of tester, then they will either buy the album or take notice of the band, which isn't that bad as at least the band or artist has had some sort of coverage.

It also makes it difficult to distinguish a boundary - we all copy or music and some of us let friends have a copy if they cannot find it OR buy it. Finding music can be difficult. iTunes, though useful, has a lot of music which Amazon MP3, Tesco Digital, Play.com and so forth may not have, but some people want the choice to shop around. Take physical property, you can buy a car (keeping with the piracy adverts) from one official place, while you can also get them at other places keeping it competitive. You cannot really get that with music, possibly because there's quite a lot of it out there.

Good luck if they try.