Several cases around the world now puts sensor ship on the agenda to many politicians. The Swedish civil engineer and member of the Swedish government IT council tells that there is a pressure from lots of arenas to put forward limitations to what type of information that can be exchanged on the internet.

He also tells that there is signals around the world, that the politicians just itches to introduce sensor ship on the internet.

Ström, has presented a report called “Storebror tar fram munkavlen” (Swedish – freely translated to Big brother limits your speech). He has also written “Den nye välfärden” (Swedish – freely translated to The new welfare).

He presents in the report that it is not only dictatorships that takes on internet sensor ship. In Italy they filter out foreign gambling sites. In Brasil they block half pornographic material on the Youtube. In Switzerland they have blocked three American sites that criticize their court system.  In Australia they are working on a system to block all sites that breaks the law on content ownership. In Germany they block all neo nazi web pages and pages that denies Holocaust. In Norway they block child pornography sites.

Seen in isolation, it makes no problem to filter certain type of content, but it exhibits a danger to the democracy to perform senro ship in this way says Ström. There is always arguments supporting limitations to freedom of speech, but not to be pre-emptive but limit it in afterhand.

Where does the borderline go between neo Nazism and fear of other cultures? What type of ideologies should be filtered out?  Should we block any fundamentalistic religious sites? Who decides what ideologies or religions should be acceptable, and where does the line go to be fundamentalist or maybe another case – extreme?

Times changes as well, not many decades ago, we would look at communism with other eyes than we do today, as well as views and standings on homo sexuality. Will these filters stand the time stamps they will have, or will they live like creatures in the shadows and never be attacked or challenged? What will it take to change the filters in the face of time?

Blocking of content on the internet versus a monitored internet sphere, where all directions are questioned and being made open or blocked according to at a time decision of what is acceptable or not.

There is nothing like a bullet proof blocking methodology on the internet. Persons, who want to get hold of certain information, can and will find ways to bypass any regional or global filters set out on the internet.

Distribution of copyrighted material on the internet has taken new dimensions the last decade due to technological developments like speed and quality of the internet.

These things put two trenches in the internet sensor ship debate. The owners of material on one side and file server content providers with their hostage the ISP’s. The content owners with copyrights on their side, says they have no choice other than to try to block ISP’s from allowing content service providers that spreads copyrighted material to use their servers. They want to use their right to defend their ownership of material and misuse of it in form of spreading, hacking etc.

On the other side, content service providers contest this fact that purchasing a product gives you the ownership of this material and does not state explicit in the law you can not share it with others. The law is unclear on how widespread this sharing can be done. Whether sharing it with a few friends or in the family versus sharing it with all your colleagues in your company would be going too far?

Where does the limit go on sharing and are there also limitations to how you offer these things for sharing?

As it is today, the law says you are breaking the law if you let f.inst a mp3 file be available to the public on a file server which is open to everybody.

Then there is another issue, which is demonstrated in a court case in Stockholm these days against Pirate Bay grounders.

They have offered a technology on file servers, which enables people to put content onto the server for distribution.

This middle man technology has been used to store copyrighted material which has been offered to the public. Who is the criminals here, the technology providers and/or the content providers. Where does the line go between these two entities?

In the court case the defenders claim that their people only provided the technology and had no idea what content was put on there, as the prosecutors claim there is a responsibility of technology providers to ensure legal content is put onto their systems and therefore they are responsible for the crimes.