Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!looking!brad From: brad@looking.on.ca (Brad Templeton) Newsgroups: comp.org.eff.talk Subject: Re: Censorship on the USENET Message-ID: <1990Nov01.064916.19218@looking.on.ca> Date: 1 Nov 90 06:49:16 GMT References: <1990Oct21.141502.26557@hoss.unl.edu> <1990Oct31.141646.25350@ifi.uio.no> Distribution: comp Organization: Looking Glass Software Ltd. Lines: 31 In article <1990Oct31.141646.25350@ifi.uio.no> joare@sdata.no writes: > >1. The University of Oslo controls distribution of USENET to ALL of > Norway. The people resposible for this first act of censorship have > expressed the intention of censoring not only the university news > feed, but also the news feed for the rest of Norway. Please explain more about this. I have never heard of any site controlling distribution of USENET into an entire country. Are there special laws forbidding other sites from getting feeds from non-Norwegian sites? Can this site tell other sites not to phone outside the country or make tcp connections, or whatever for feeds? I'm being facetious, I am sure there are no such laws. (I hope) You simply don't understand the golden rule. Anybody is permitted to get a feed. As long as this is true, there is no censorship, only their refusal to spend their resources passing stuff to you. There is quasi-censorship of people within their own university, who may not have any other means for getting outside info. In general, censorship is the use of violence to suppress information. People who try to interfere with the flow of information in non-violent ways are not good, but they are not censors. That out of the way, I am still in favour of pushing people, particularly universities, not to delete material from general media because it may be offensive. -- Brad Templeton, ClariNet Communications Corp. -- Waterloo, Ontario 519/884-7473