Amazon US under threat as internet watchdog reconsiders Scorpions censorship

Charles Arthur
London Guardian
Monday, Dec 08, 2008

The Internet Watch Foundation (IWF) is reviewing its decision to list as “child pornography” the image on one version of the album “Virgin Killer” by the rock band The Scorpions hosted on Wikipedia – and might yet add Amazon US to its list of “blocked” sites for hosting the picture.

That could be disastrous for Amazon if it prevents people in the UK accessing its pages on the week that is expected to be the busiest online before Christmas.

The initial decision to block the image, taken on Friday, prevented UK contributors from editing the site, and blocked some people from seeing the site at all (although they were still able to view it through Google’s cache).

That is because the IWF’s system adds both the URL of an image and of a page containing the image to its “blacklist” of pages to be blocked. “Illegal sites often hide images in pages,” said Sarah Robertson, director of communications for the IWF.

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The decision to ban the page, which was taken after consultation with the UK’s Child Exploitation and Online Protection (CEOP) agency, is now being reviewed, Robertson said. “The assessment was done in partnership with law enforcement.”

• A d v e r t i s e m e n t

The Scorpions image was deemed to be “1 on a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is the least offensive”, said Robertson. The image was judged to be “erotic posing with no sexual activity”. It depicts a young naked girl with her genitals obscured by a crack in the camera lens.

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