Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by dragly 3343 days ago
Denmark, Finland, France and many other countries censor The Pirate Bay: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Countries_blocking_access_to_T...
2 comments

That link says: blocking access due to copyright issues. Respectfully, I don't think you're doing justice to the Turkish freedom of speech issue of Wikipedia being blocked by bringing up The Pirate Bay.
> That link says: blocking access due to copyright issues. Respectfully, I don't think you're doing justice to the Turkish freedom of speech issue of Wikipedia being blocked by bringing up The Pirate Bay.

Can we both agree that both of these things shouldn't happen and ThePirateBay and Wikipedia shouldn't be censored by any country?

Sure, but there's a time and a place, if you know what I mean. One directly undermines access to information, whereas another has to do with copyright law.
Torrents contain information. Blocking torrent aggregators directly undermines access to information.
I did not mean to compare the two cases at all and am sorry if it came out that way. I just wanted to answer the parent post on 'what the "anomalies" this site detects in Denmark, Finland, and France represent' by pointing out that TPB is blocked/censored in these countries. I only meant to point out one possible reason why the above site listed these countries.
So… that's a case of dishonestly conflating shutting down a locally illegal operations and speech/political censorship. Hardly helping the case.
Denmark censors a lot more than just TPB, though it is probably the one website that causes most people to circumvent the censorship.

In Denmark it all started out with blocking child porn sites, then it was expanded to copyright infringement, then it was expanded to companies operating illegally (counterfeit goods stores, illegal gambling, alternative medicine stores) and most recently the government started blocking "terror propaganda" [1] - which means they have begun censoring political speech.

This is in spite of a constitution forbidding censorship, with the counterpoint being that since it's technically private companies doing the censorship, it doesn't violate the constitution. Even though ISPs will be taken to court if they don't censor sites [2]

[1] https://www.information.dk/indland/2016/10/statsligt-debatto...

[2] https://www.version2.dk/artikel/dansk-internetudbyder-traekk...

Sorry, but I did not intend to compare or conflate the two cases. I wanted to give an answer to the parent poster why those countries might be listed on the above site.
The French definitely censor more than just pirate sites.