Censorship(tm) GoDaddy & Police

Today we finally got the domain KOPIMI.COM transferred away from GoDaddy.
I don’t know if people are aware, but basically GoDaddy did not like the content of the site and shut it down for quote “Spam and Abuse”-reasons.

On the site (which if it doesn’t work with Kopimi.com you could try Kopimi.se which contains the same content) there are Kopimi logos made by the Kopimi-creator.

Kopimi has it’s own dance - the Copy Me-dance - and on the frontpage of the site, the son of the creator (let’s not call him Jesus, but his name is Ikko Kopimi in fact) dances this dance. It’s a happy family thing with a kid actually named after the idea of Kopimi, nothing sexual in any way but still GoDaddy and others went on a moral guilt-trip about this. They got the domain suspended, they lobbied the domain into the Swedish Child Porn filter (and what I’ve heard it’s also in the Danish one now).

After some emails to the police and godaddy that we didn’t get any answers to we decided we needed to do something.
Having the censoring power that a registrar has we first had to move all of the other domains we had at godaddy so they wouldn’t suspend them for some reason as well.

While doing this we started talking to the police again but in a more aggressive tone and this second time around they got it.

This is a translated version of the e-mail I received from the police officer in charge:

Complaints has been received from the public where they pointed out that child porn material is available on the website http://www.kopimi.com/.

Our judgement, according to general legal principles, was that the pictures on the site was of a character of child porn. With this as a reason the site was blocked.

After taking part of your opinions we discussed the issue with the office of the public prosecutor whereas another judgement was made.
We have therefor immediately decided to remove the block of the site.

Ok, so the police removed the block - good. But this raises a couple of really interesting questions.

• a) Why did they block it to begin with, on what they call “general legal principles”. Is that based on… what? Censor first, ask questions later? What was the legal basis for doing this?
• b) The site is hosted in Sweden. If the Swedish police (and remember, we’re talking about the department that is in charge of child abuse on the Internet) finds child porn within Swedens border I would really hope that they would do what the law requires them to do - find the guilty person, charge him for distribution of child porn and abuse. Not just block the site from being accessed from some ISPs! Isn’t it criminal for them to avoid bringing known people to court? We really need to get rid of child porn, so do your job ffs!
• c) I have not heard about sites being put in this filter wrongly before (luckily). Is it just a coincidence that people that see the problems of any filter (since it can make the situations worse) actually get filtered, FOR the wrong reasons? The freedom of speech-fighters are publicly saying that this filter is not functioning. I hate the word conspiracy (although you can’t spell it without piracy, pun intended) but this does not feel like a coincidence.
• d) Are the police going to give us some sort of compensation for falsely accusing us of being involved in child porn? Getting that label is a very ugly thing, where we probably already lost a lot of fans due to them seeing “blocked due to child abuse” when they wanted to visit the page. So, who is paying the fines and making this right? I got an address from the police where we could file to get loss of income back, but how about the brand Kopimi? It will forever be associated with something which it is not. How do you compensate that the government destroy peoples reputation?

I want to point out some things here for those of you who don’t know the real deal. No, we don’t like child porn! And yes, we would love to see child porn vanish, but there are different approaches in achieving goals like this.
A filter will only hide what it filters. The problem will not go away, the filter will make the criminals just use more advanced technologies. This happens in all areas, from terrorism, money laundring to trafficking, you name it. The filter will in the end just affect normal people and has no positive effect what so ever, it will only become a problem where the innocent people will get hurt and at the same time be an extra cost for the government to run.

Since the internet is a hydra things do not disapperar, they just move. To fight bad things on the internet involves thinking in new ways, it involves being creative, not abusing the power position you have.

When it comes to GoDaddy the case is maybe even worse. The police can at least blame incompetence (although they should have caught up with technology or at least hired people that has). GoDaddy is a giant technology company that abused their power - a power invested in them from the end-users I might add, by letting ICANN accredit them - to close down a site they did not morally approve of. It is not the place of a registrar to approve the content of their customers, just as little as an ISP should be allowed to moderate content for their customers!

We must react to this. Just by leaving GoDaddy is a good start, check out the page NoDaddy for more horror stories similar to this. And everybody should think through this simple question: Do we want Internet or do we want another censored read-only medium?