Stan Beer
Wednesday, 10 December 2008 15:14
Opinion and Analysis
Page 2 of 3
The girl in the photo, a niece of
one of the band members who is now a middle-aged woman, has gone on
record saying that she has never had a problem with the photo. Over the
past three decades and certainly during the Internet age, an image of
the album cover has reportedly appeared in many publications and on
many web sites.
One such website is
Wikipedia, which features a series of pages devoted to Scorpions. The
Wikipedia Scorpions page lists all of the albums released by the band,
each with a link to a separate page containing information about the
album.
Clicking on the Virgin Killer link takes a visitor to a
Wikipedia page with lots of text about the album, the controversy
surrounding it and a small pic of the original album cover. It is quite
obvious that this is a page devoted to the history of this album and is
not intended to be a page promoting child pornography.
Yet this
did not stop EU and UK Internet industry funded watchdog Internet Watch
Foundation (IWF) summarily adding the Scorpions page on Wikipedia to
its blacklist when it received a complaint. The effect was that a large
proportion of UK Internet users could not access the Scorpions page on
Wikipedia and some couldn't even access Wikipedia.
The resulting
outcry from the Wikimedia organisation and the general public over the
blatant censorship has since forced the IWF to back down and remove the
page from its black list.
Thankfully in that particular instance
common sense prevailed. However, it highlights the dangers of
restricting access to information without due process of law. This is
especially so when it has been reported that the IWF list is one that
could be used in Australia, which then creates an even worse situation
than our own Government censoring the Internet: foreign parties
deciding what Austalians can or cannot see!
Yet, as an even more
recent case shows, the law itself can be a victim of hysteria. In a
judgement handed down in the NSW Supreme Court yesterday, a man who was
caught with cartoons on his computer depicting The Simpsons children
engaged in sex acts was convicted for possessing child pornography.
CONTINUED Page 3
