CyberLaw Blog

Archive for the ‘racist content’ Category

French Jewish group to sue YouTube: AFP, Thursday, August 14, 2008.

PARIS - A French Jewish group said Thursday it is suing the YouTube video-sharing website over a clip showing a host of Jewish public figures to the soundtrack of a pre-war anti-Semitic song.

The video posted on the U.S. site YouTube and its French rival Dailymotion shows a slideshow of more than 150 French politicians, TV stars, journalists, writers, philosophers, actors, singers and comedians.

It is set to the sound of a song recorded before World War II, called “Rebecca’s wedding,” which describes the guests at a Jewish wedding as dirty, rude and dishonest.

“We consider this video, though it names no-one, to be a photographic list of an anti-Semitic nature and therefore liable to criminal prosecution,” the head of the National Bureau of Vigilance Against Anti-Semitism (BNVCA), Sammy Ghozlan, said in a statement.

He said he filed suit against Dailymotion and the author of the video on Tuesday, and intended to take similar action against YouTube after discovering it too was hosting the clip.

The anti-Semitism bureau took legal action earlier this week after it found a Paris store selling T-shirts printed with the phrase “Jews forbidden from entering the park,” in German and Polish.

A Chinese woman and her daughter, who run the store in the multi-ethnic Belleville neighbourhood of Paris, were later arrested and are facing possible charges of incitement to racial hatred, judicial officials said Thursday.

Investigators are trying to track down who manufactured, distributed and imported the T-shirts, whose inscriptions are reproduced from 1940 banners that targeted the Jews of Lodz, central Poland.

Poland was occupied by Nazi Germany at that time, and 95 percent of the 200,000 Jews held in the Lodz ghetto eventually died in concentration camps.

Belleville, in the northeast of the capital, has been the scene of clashes between gangs of Jewish and north African youths, in which a 17-year-old Jewish boy was seriously injured in June.

France is home to Europe’s largest Jewish commuity, estimated at 600,000 people, and its largest Muslim community, at around five million.

France blocks online child porn, terrorism, racism - Yahoo! News: ARIS - France is joining at least five other countries where Internet service providers block access to child pornography and to content linked to terrorism and racial hatred, the French interior minister said Tuesday.

The agreement will take effect in September. A blacklist will be compiled based on input from Internet users who flag sites containing offensive material, Interior Minister Michel Alliot-Marie said.

All service providers in France have agreed to block offending sites, he said.

‘We can no longer tolerate the sexual exploitation of children in the form of child pornography,’ Alliot-Marie said. ‘We have come to an agreement: access to child pornography sites will be blocked in France. Other democracies have done it. France could wait no longer.’

Offensive sites will be referred to judicial authorities, the minister said.

A similar deal was announced Tuesday in New York, where Verizon, Sprint and Time Warner Cable agreed with New York state officials to block access to child porn.

Britain, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Canada and New Zealand are among other countries that have already implemented similar measures.

Bits: Tracking Hate 2.0 on the Web: The Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights organization, says the number of online hate sites has jumped 30 percent in the last year.

At the briefing, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, an associate dean at the Simon Wiesenthal Center, a Jewish human rights group based in Los Angeles, presented the organization’s annual study of online terror and hate. He said the group had identified some 8,000 problematic sites in the last 12 months, a 30 percent spike over last year.

(Via NYT > Technology.)

For further information about the Congressional Hearing visit Hate in the Information Age (15 May, 2008)

Cartoons of a Racist Past Lurk on YouTube - New York Times: “”

Published: April 28, 2008

Among the millions of clips on the video-sharing Web site YouTube are 11 racially offensive Warner Brothers cartoons that have not been shown in an authorized release since 1968. Some of the cartoons were removed on April 16. A message saying the cartoons were no longer available because of a copyright claim by Warner appeared in their place. By evening the messages disappeared, and some of the cartoons were back. Representatives for YouTube and Warner would not confirm whether the companies had tried to remove the cartoons.

In addition to the Cybercrime Convention, the Council of Europe also developed the first additional protocol to the Cybercrime Convention on the criminalisation of acts of a racist or xenophobic nature committed through computer systems (ETS No. 189).

Ratification Status for the Additional Protocol as of April 2008

32 Member States (including the external supporters Canada, and South Africa) have signed the Additional Protocol since it was opened to signature in January 2003, only 11 Member States (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Cyprus, Denmark, France,  Latvia, Lithuania, Slovenia, Ukraine, and the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia) have ratified the Additional Protocol as of April 2008.

Following the initial five ratifications the Additional Protocol came into force on March 1, 2006. The UK is not among the Member States who have signed it so far.

For further information about the Additional Protocol see the following:

• Akdeniz, Y., Stocktaking on efforts to combat Racism on the Internet, background report for the High Level Seminar on Racism and the Internet, Intergovernmental Working Group on the Effective Implementation of the Durban Declaration and Programme of Action, Fourth session, Geneva, 16-27 January 2006, E/CN.4/2006/WG.21/BP.1, published by the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (UNHCHR) Office: Geneva, January 2006, 45pp.
• Akdeniz, Y., An Advocacy Handbook for the Non Governmental Organisations: The Council of Europe’s Cyber-Crime Convention 2001 and the additional protocol on the criminalisation of acts of a racist or xenophobic nature committed through computer systems, Cyber-Rights & Cyber-Liberties, December 2003 (revised and updated in August 2007).
• Akdeniz, Y., “Governing Racist Content on the Internet: National and International Responses,” (2007) University of New Brunswick Law Journal (Canada), Vol. 56, Spring, 103-161. (available upon request via email)