News: AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers

[News Bot]

eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"


Read more of this story at Slashdot.

[rotrap]

Huh, some Chinese officials infiltrate AU? Would not have expected them to go the Internet censorship route. Wonder what is driving it.

[Ze-Tomb]

Originally Posted by rotrap

Huh, some Chinese officials infiltrate AU? Would not have expected them to go the Internet censorship route. Wonder what is driving it.

No Chinese officials.

The f**king Australian government dislike the kiddy porn (ofc understandable) but is also using that reason to block content of other things (e.g. brains and guts for L4D 2). It pisses me and many other people off. The Government has gotten soft and in my opinion, softening the reality of life in other areas.

In my blunt opinion, the Government is blocking unnecessary things to keep the country "Safe" and the "perfect land". The Government needs to teach people that the world isn't all "If Jim has X milk and Jemma has Y, how much more milk has Jim got than Jemma?". A more appropriate question would be "If John has X Grams of Cocaine and wants Y Grams, how much more does he need to buy at $Z/Gram?".

The blocking and restriction of content in Australia raises a slight bit of irony in my opinion. We started out as a convict colony of Irish & English criminals who were caught stealing, assaulting, blackmailing etc.. IF the government plans on changing all of this, I can assure them, there will be leaks with ever-changing ways of doing the same thing.

If the internet Censorship turns out to block content of that from Banned games then it is too far and deserves some action to be done. I certainly would NOT stand for it. It just seems too un-Australian. I grew up knowing that Australia was a wonderful country with free exchange of information & opinions. If gaming is apart of Operation No Child Porn, then I tell them scrap it.

Stopping the electronic exchange of Child Porn puts more children at risk in the real world. Without their fix from their comrades they will go out into the public, kidnap and sexually assault innocent children.



I'm done for now.
This is what the entire censorship shit is about.

[Mikass]

Seems history didn`t teach us much. All censorship and forbidding ends up badly in the end. The prohibition in US is good example, communist censorship which lead to its downfall in all Eastern Europe or the war on drugs and prostitution which is a lost war as history proved time and time again. The countries that have the most liberal laws are most successful in handling the these things that can cause potential problems.

Regarding solely videogames, Japan is very interesting case. They have full scale of porn and violence in videogames and cartoons but lowest crimerates. At least used to be like this.