Culture

UK ISPs Restore Access to Wikipedia Scorpions Album Cover

by Jordan Yerman | December 7, 2008 at 07:55 am

2139 views | 9 Recommendations | 7 comments

Update: The Internet Watchdog Foundation has backed down, and access to the Wikipedia page depicting The Scorpions' "Virgin Killer" album cover has been restored for UK visitors.

The IWF now says that given the age and availability of the image, it was no longer on its list of proscribed sites.

Six UK ISPs are restricting access to Wikipedia pages based on the Scorpions' Virgin Killer album cover. I'm not making this up. Here's the page (some of you won't be able to see it). I'd argue that it's not porn, as the context will show: it's in bad taste, for sure, but, without seeing the image, the commentary about why the album cover was changed doesn't really make much sense.

As of Sunday morning UK time, certain British web surfers were unable to view at least one Wikipedia article tagged with ostensible child porn. And, in a roundabout way, the filtering has resulted in Wikipedia admins banning large swaths of the United Kingdom from editing the "free encyclopedia anyone can edit."

On Friday, Wikipedia administrators noticed that Virgin Media, Be Unlimited/O2/Telefonica, EasyNet/UK Online, PlusNet, Demon, and Opal were routing Wikipedia traffic through a small number of transparent proxy servers as a way of blocking access to the encyclopedia's article on Virgin Killer, a mid-1970s record album from German heavy band Scorpions.

The problem with this is, should a user abuse Wikipedia and get his/her/its IP address blocked, also blocked will be aaaaalllll the users getting corralled through that same proxy address.

This is causing many problems for Wikipedia administrators, because much of the UK vandalism now comes from a single IP, which, when blocked, affects potentially hundreds of thousands of anonymous users who intend no harm and are utterly confused as to why they are no longer able to edit. The image was flagged by the the Internet Watch Foundation, which is funded by the EU and the UK government, and has the support of many ISPs and online institutions in the UK. The filter is fairly easy to circumvent simply by viewing the article in some other languages, or by logging in on the secure version of Wikipedia."

Wikimedia's stance on self-censorship aside, there seems to be a larger problem here: that of context.

Is all nudity pornographic? No. Attempting to put soft corners on the Internet is a fool's errand, and dilutes the legitimate argument against child porn.

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Paschen

at 08:59 on December 7th, 2008

I am surprised this is happening in the UK.

rennes (not verified)

at 00:00 on December 8th, 2008

don't be surprised the UK has some of the strictest laws in the world, cartoons, family baby photos, art photos previously legal, even paintings could be interpreted as indecent images, Elton john had an arts exhibition raided for it last year in Liverpool, perverts will always twist innocent images, the question is should innocent people and innocent organisations be criminalised by laws intended to protect innocent children, The powers that be need to spend their time and money shutting down the scum with the real child/animal/rape porn sites if they can ban wikipedia they can stop them too. Still have to wonder how much other stuff on wikipedia annoys the uk government.

generaldecay

at 07:19 on December 10th, 2008

Paschen, alas the UK is no longer the free country that it was. We're fastly becoming a police state. Some people argue that we have done so already.

John Wayne (not verified)

at 13:10 on December 7th, 2008

next thing you know they're going to say what we can and cannot wear!!! we'll all have to wear uniforms to be a frakin citizen, censor everything!!! sob's! fascist pigs

DeeDee89 (not verified)

at 21:16 on December 7th, 2008

I can't view the page by clicking the given link, but I can view the page in a cached version only. I think it's a lot of fuss. Yes the image is..well thought provoking etc, but it's essentially an article about the album, and the album cover just happens to be of that photo.

Perhaps a warning could be used on that page before people see the cover if people find it offensive or something. I dunno, I'm not good with arguments so I'll end there. But it's unfair that the majority of the UK is blocked. I can't even edit the page (if for example there's a typo or misleading statement) if I wanted to. Meh, it's like censorship. I get why it's been done but still. :s

Dodgy Geezer (not verified)

at 02:30 on December 8th, 2008

This record cover is NOT child porn. It may be indecent and tasteless, depending on your taste, but it is obviously nothing to do with child abuse. The unelected and unanswerable IWF have made a huge mistake here.

If we can make enough of a protest about this maybe we can slow down the inevitable collapse of our culture into an opressive state-directed tyranny....