Two days ago, we pointed to a story about the German government forcing ISPs to agree to a web filtering program in the country. There were fears that the filters would be used as a tool for censorship – it clearly didn’t take long for that to happen.
A report from German news site Heise.de (German) says that book publishers in Germany are demanding that the famous one-click hosting site Rapidshare be put on the national blacklist. An essential part of the report was translated by p2p-blog which features this:
“I don’t see any other way than access controls to get to platforms like these that are based in foreign countries,” said Boersenverein chief counsel Christian Sprang according to heise.de. ISPs should charge their customers for the costs of instituting these block lists. Sprang also called one-click-hosters like Rapidshare part of the “Internet mafia”, and complained that ISPs would finance these services with ad buys on their sites.
The report also reminds us that the copyright industry attempted to add file-sharing websites to a blacklist already. We have noted a similar case over a year ago where the copyright industry in Germany was turned down by the government to retain the information of all those who access copyrighted materials for the 6 month period for investigation purposes.
Clearly, this is a case where the fears are realized over the potential abuse of the new internet filters in Germany. In this case, it was barely a day before the copyright industry wanted to utilize the new found power for their bottom line. It leads one to wonder how many other incumbent industries are currently lobbying the government to be able to use the blacklists for their own financial interests.
Related Posts
- German Mandatory DNS Blacklist Blasted By Critics, Protests Emerge
- RapidShare Fined $33 million for Violating German Copyright Laws
- German Lawyer Speaks About Risks of Using One-Click File Hosters
- Rapidshare.de Reborn As Rapidshare.com; Introduces Free Collector Accounts
- German District Court Orders Rapidshare to Block Copyrighted Content
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Isn’t rapidshare German?
.de>>German
.com>>Switzerland
So I’m not crazy. So rather than make the site illegal within the country, they want the government to just censor it from its citizens?
Germany want to use the blacklist to earn some money? a crazy government!
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See thats why the WWW is open source and no single government should touch it…
I’m from germany.
Officialy it’s about censoring Childpornography.
Nobody really buys it though.
A minister for Family(what do you call that position?) is behind the scam,involving telecommunication(does anyone see the odds here?)
Most of the sites could be taken down easyly(according to some sources)(and the rest is still accessible via proxies) so personally i think only Contentindustry is behind this, if we are lucky.
They said that there is an entire industrie earning profit from making child-pronography and that you only have to surf for a few minutes `till you are flooded with these perverted shit.
So its about telling one thing and doing another.
And no the government doesn’t want to earn money with this.How could they,besides beeing (god forbid)bribed for letting that shit pass?
What is up with the crazy book publishers now
In germany we often have the problem that our government decides for the people and adults are being treated like children. Really disturbing and frustrating.
Do they think more publishers will set up business in Germany if they do this?
That is silly really because this would help Amazon way more than it would help any German publishers. It’s more of a present to the publishers than an incentive to do business in Germany.