Egypt Bans Porn Websites: Good Luck With That

from the yeah,-that'll-work... dept

It appears that Egypt is the latest country to think that it can ban certain websites by court mandate. In this case, it's all pornographic websites, which have been deemed "venomous and vile" by the court. The lawyer who was arguing against those sites responded happily: "Thank God we won, now the government should stop these electronic dens of vice immediately." Of course, what's been left unstated is exactly how the government can stop pornographic websites? My guess is they'll demand ISPs do it for them. However, in the meantime, we're left wondering how these "venomous and vile" sites are forcing themselves on poor Egyptians. I do plenty of web surfing and have found that simply not surfing porn websites is a rather effective way to not have to deal with such "electronic dens of vice."

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Grad Student Uses Twitter To Get Released From Egyptian Prison

from the twitter-pr-people-must-be-thrilled dept

Recently, Tim wrote about how aspects of Twitter could represent the future of news, and it appears that may be happening faster than some people expected. In a story that must absolutely thrill any PR person working for Twitter, a UC Berkeley grad student who was filming protests in Egypt was able to alert his friends to the fact he was arrested by Egyptian police through a message on Twitter. This resulted in a coordinated effort to get him released, which eventually involved the US State Department. You get the feeling that this story will move into PR legend like the story of the guy who self-diagnosed a heart attack using Google.

Still, it is a rather remarkable example of how Twitter can be quite useful. While there are plenty of people (myself included at one point) who wrote off the service as being rather useless, it's been evolving in very interesting ways. For those who embrace it, it can become a rather useful quick and easy public messaging and conversation tool. While, James Karl Buck could have sent a text message to a friend, the simplicity and public nature of Twitter allowed him to alert a lot of people nearly instantly to the situation he was in -- and they responded. Not only did they reach out to get help, they also quickly responded to James on Twitter, providing advice on how to deal with the fact that he was arrested. Still, what's not entirely clear in this whole story is how he was able to continue to use his mobile phone while under arrest. While the lesson some may learn from this is that arresting officers will quickly take people's mobile phones away, that doesn't lessen the impact of a service like Twitter and its ability to spread a message to a lot of friends and acquaintances extremely quickly.

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Egypt's Plans To 'Copyright' The Pyramids

from the you-have-got-to-be-kidding dept

We've had plenty of posts discussing the ridiculousness of copyright extension, especially when it applies to works retroactively. However, we're usually talking about content created in the last century. Not any more. It seems that this era's obsessions with misunderstanding the purpose of copyright is about to taken to a new level of absurdity. Chris was among many of you who took time out of your holiday feasts to alert us to the fact that Egypt is preparing to "copyright" the pyramids, the sphinx and other Egyptian antiquities. Of course "copyright" is being used loosely here. Realistically, it sounds like some Egyptian politicians need to come up with a plan to raise more tax revenue for the government, and so they came up with this bizarre plan to pretend that they can tax anyone who creates a likeness of famous Egyptian monuments. Apparently this decision came just days after a newspaper editorial suggested that the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas owes the Egyptian gov't a share of its profits. Realistically, this has nothing to do with copyright at all, but is simply just an excuse to try to try to bring in additional tax revenue by misappropriating the concept of copyright as a weak rationale for the tax. However, in an age where copyright supporters want people to think that copyright is the same thing as real property, it's much easier to get people to believe this is a reasonable proposal. Of course, given that the real purpose of copyright is supposed to be about creating incentives for the creation of new content, does this mean we're going to start seeing new pyramids start springing up in Egypt anytime soon?

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YouTube Suspends Egyptian Anti-Torture Activist's Account

from the unintended-consequences dept

YouTube is catching a lot of flack for suspending the account of an Egyptian activist who had captured evidence of police brutality on video and uploaded it to the site. YouTube's "community guidelines" state that "graphic or gratuitous violence is not allowed" on YouTube. Apparently, that includes graphic or gratuitous violence perpetrated by governments against innocent civilians. I have to say I don't understand why YouTube goes to so much trouble to censor "objectionable" content. If the goal is to keep such materials away from children, there are effective ways to do that without censoring the material altogether. Flickr, for example, permits pornographic photographs to be uploaded to its site, but it restricts access to them in various ways that helps prevent children from inadvertently stumbling across them. YouTube should be able to implement a similar system. Instead of deleting objectionable content, it should flag it as objectionable. Objectionable content might not show up on the home page or in the default search results. It might also require clicking through a warning page before viewing it. But it's hard to see what purpose is served by deleting the content entirely. The content will be posted somewhere else, where someone else will derive advertising revenue from it. And in the process, YouTube is inadvertently giving the impression that it is helping oppressive governments squelch criticism of their regimes.

Timothy Lee is an expert at the Insight Community. To get insight and analysis from Timothy Lee and other experts on challenges your company faces, click here.

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