Brazil Bans Bully And A Bunch Of Blogs

from the can't-stop-banning dept

Brazil seems to be really into banning things online these days. You may recall the totally pointless ban on YouTube to hide a single video (which a lot more people saw after the ban was put in place). Eventually the courts reversed the ban and even required the model whose video resulted in the ban to pay Google as compensation for the unnecessary ban. Even with that experience, however, it looks like the Brazilian courts are prone to overreacting and broadly banning anything it doesn't like.

First up is the news that a Brazilian court has banned the sale of the video game Bully. This would be the same video game that Jack Thompson went to court to have banned even though he had never played it -- and even though anti-bullying activists praised the game, noting that it really was no different than movies like Rushmore or Napoleon Dynamite. The judge's explanation for the ban is a bit weak: "The aggravating factor is that everything in the game takes place inside a school." I really don't see how that matters. The game is about a kid learning to deal with different cliques and factions in a school. That seems rather realistic. Does the judge think that real life cliques in schools will suddenly disappear if this game is unavailable? Perhaps Stephen King can head to Brazil and convince them why this is wrong.

On top of that, news is coming out that a Brazilian court has also banned access to Wordpress.com, one of the most popular blog hosting sites around. It looks quite similar to the YouTube situation, where the judge really just wanted a single blog banned, but without an easy way to do that, ISPs are blocking the entire site and every blog carried on Wordpress. This is, just as with the other bans, a total overreaction. Not only will it call more attention to the "problem" blog, it will piss off and inconvenience a ton of totally innocent people as well.

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