YouTube site 'blocked' in Morocco
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Moroccan internet users unable to access YouTube say they fear it is being blocked by the authorities.
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(InfoWorld) - A press advocacy group is "dismayed" about Google's decision to block YouTube videos from viewers in Thailand that are considered inappropriate or illegal by that Asian government. The International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), calling Google's reported agreement with the Thai government "a censorship deal," said on Wednesday that the move creates "a dangerous precedent, which could have global implications for freedom of expression." "There is a clear potential for abuse of people's right to information, which seems much more likely now [that] Google has demonstrated its willingness to collude with governments to effectively censor information," IFJ Asia-Pacific Director Jacqueline Park said in a statement. The Thailand Embassy in Washington, D.C., didn't immediately respond to requests for comment. On Friday and during the weekend, various news outlets reported from Bangkok that Thailand had lifted a five-month ban on YouTube for its residents after Google agreed to block videos the government finds objectionable. In an article posted Friday, the International Herald Tribune quoted Sitthichai Pookaiyaudom, Thailand's minister of information and communications technology, as saying that YouTube had agreed to block clips deemed offensive to Thai culture or that violate Thai law. People accessing YouTube from outside of Thailand will be able to view the videos blocked in that country, the minister told the International Herald Tribune. Thailand blocked all access to Google's YouTube, the world's most popular video-sharing site, in early April after someone posted a video the government considered insulting to the country's king. YouTube is "pleased to hear" that access to its site has been reinstated in Thailand, a YouTube spokesman said via e-mail Wednesday. "We appreciate the constructive dialogue we have had with the ICT (Information and Communications Technology) Ministry.Â YouTube remains committed to removing videos when they violate our content policies, and we will continue to work closely with authorities in Thailand," the YouTube spokesman wrote. YouTube has taken steps to make sure that its users in Thailand will not be able to access videos that have been identified as violating the country's laws, he confirmed. Asked if YouTube's parent company had any reaction to the IFJ's criticism, he said the question should answered by a Google official. At press time, no one from Google had responded to this question. Those found guilty of offending the monarchy face serious penalties in Thailand. Days before the YouTube incident, a Swiss national living in Thailand got slapped with a 10-year jail sentence for defacing images of the king. This is the latest incident in which Google and other providers of Internet services, such as Yahoo and Microsoft, find themselves criticized for censorship by human rights organizations, press advocacy groups, U.S. legislators, and shareholders. For example, several Internet companies have been criticized for agreeing to censor content in their China sites and search engines that the Chinese government finds objectionable. Yahoo in particular has been blasted often for cooperating with the Chinese governmentÂ and providing information that has led to the arrest of dissidents and journalists. Google, Microsoft, Yahoo, and others invariably defend themselves saying that they must comply with the local laws of the countries in which they do business and that governments must collaborate to establish international standards of operation. "We always welcome constructive discussions with local governments around the world on similar issues. We are committed to addressing these questions in ways that both respect relevant laws and cultural concerns and are consistent with our global content policies," the YouTube spokesman wrote. When it comes to content that may break local laws, YouTube works with local authorities to resolve the issues. "We think this approach strikes the right balance betweenÂ freedom of expression and respect for local law," he wrote. Thailand recently introduced the Computer Crime Act, which gives authorities the power to seize the computers of people suspected of accessing or creating content deemed insulting or pornographic, according to the IFJ. Activist, social worker and webmaster Sombat Bun-ngam-anong is currently serving a 12-day detention order for alleged defamation for violating the Act, the IFJ said in Wednesday's statement. Also on Wednesday, Reporters Without Borders, another international press watchdog group, reported that a Thai blogger named Pichai has been reportedly detained for the past 12 days, also for violating the Act, which this group says took effect on July 18. The blogger's arrest "confirms our fears about the dangers of a law that is supposed to combat pornography but turns out to be a way of restricting and controlling press freedom," Reporters Without Borders charged.
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In an obvious effort to keep its citizens from seeing content that it hasn't already pre-approved, the Chinese government is about to block video sites it doesn't control.
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RABAT, Morocco - Moroccans were able to access the video sharing Web site YouTube on Wednesday for the first time since access was blocked last week.
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InfoWorld - Â China watchers, get your scorecards out: Google's YouTube is blocked,Â Wikipedia is still blocked, but, for the moment, Google blog site Blogspot.com is available and some pictures from Yahoo's Flickr photos can once again be viewed.
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TOKYO -- A Japanese entertainment group has asked the popular video-sharing site YouTube Inc. to implement a system to prevent users from uploading videos that would infringe copyrights, a group spokesman said yesterday.
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(InfoWorld) - GoogleÂ launched versions of its video sharing service YouTube in French and other languages on Tuesday. Localized versions now exist for Brazil, France, Ireland, Italy, Japan, the Netherlands, Poland, Spain, the U.K., and the U.S. TheÂ French siteÂ features titles and help pages in French, and the top video is a welcome message from French rapper Kamini, who began promoting his brand of rural rap through YouTube's English-language site last November with a video clip entitled "Marly-Gomont". For now, the international sites draw on the same database of videos and rankings as the U.S. site, but in time Google plans to add country-specific video rankings and comments, it said Tuesday. Today, the French site displays French-language content and rankings previously posted to the main site. "The big thing for YouTube in 2007 is access," YouTube founder Chad Hurley said at a Google news conference in Paris on Tuesday. Hurley and his co-foundersÂ sold YouTube to GoogleÂ last October for $1.65 billion. "We have a goal to put YouTube on every screen, and we mean on mobile devices and in the living room. Right now it's restricted to your browser, to your PC, and we want you to be able to take that same content and bring it to your mobile phone and be able to watch it in your living room," Hurley said. Plans to reach those other screens are already under way: on May 30, Apple announced it will put YouTube in the living room by building support for it into a future software update for itsÂ AppleTV set-top box, while on Saturday YouTube launched a version of its site for mobile phones. However, it will require partnerships with mobile phone operators, and months or even years of work, before YouTube Mobile offers the same experience as the Web site offers PC users today, Hurley said. Over half of YouTube's traffic today comes from outside the U.S., Hurley said, and delivering localized versions of YouTube is a way for the company to capitalize on that. However, expanding internationally may expose YouTube to the kinds of censorship issues that Google has been experiencing in China. "I think a platform such as YouTube has to respect local laws and customs," YouTube founder Chad Hurley, adding that the company is developing ways to enable the fine-grained control of content required to do that. In preparation for the launch of the new sites, YouTube has already signed content partnerships with the British Broadcasting Corp.; French 24-hour news channel France 24; Spain's Antena 3 and Cuatro TV; RÃ¡dio e TelevisÃ£o de Portugal; the Dutch VPRO and NPO; European football clubs such as Chelsea FC, AC Milan, Barcelona FC, and Real Madrid, and nonprofit organizations such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, and MÃ©dÃ©cins du Monde, said Google. In the past, Google's cultural initiatives such asÂ Google Book SearchÂ have faced criticism -- from the head of the French National Library, Jean-NoÃ«l Jeanneney, among others -- for the way in which they encourage the dominance of U.S. values by making it easier to find cultural resources in English than in other languages. Linking with producers of local cultural content and making it easier to search that material may improve Google's image in some countries. That said, YouTube has proved popular in Europe despite only having an English-language interface until now. In France in April, its U.S. site had almost as many visitors as the French-language pages of local video sharing service DailyMotion, according to market researcher comScore,Â (DailyMotion also offers services in a number of other languages, including English, German, Russian, and Japanese.) One European language notably missing from the new crop of YouTube sites is German. YouTube is already the No. 1 video sharing site in Germany, according to Comscore, narrowly ahead of the German-language service MyVideo operated by MyVideo Broadband SRL of Bucharest, Romania. In Germany, it's more important to understand the German viewer's mind-set than their language, according to Anca-Alina Seghedi, CEO of MyVideo. "Most of the German users of video communities already speak English, at least sufficiently to navigate on an international web site. That means the language barrier is not the main decisive point for users to choose their favorite web sites," she said Friday. MyVideo may be better placed to understand Germans than YouTube, said Seghedi. "It is questionable whether they will be able to adapt to the German consumer tastes, which has been quite an important aspect of MyVideo's success in Germany." At Google's news conference on Tuesday, YouTube international manager Sakina Arsiwala said: "We have to talk to more people on the ground. We were not ready for Germany yet, from the product side or partnership side. We would love to be in Germany." (James Niccolai in Paris contributed to this report.) Â
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(InfoWorld) - A group of 23 Japanese entertainment industry associations and broadcasters has yet to receive a response from YouTubeÂ toÂ complaints raised earlier this monthÂ regarding copyright infringement on the popular online video site. The Japanese Society for Rights of Authors, Composers and Publishers (JASRAC) sent a letter with the signature of the 23 organizations to YouTube Chief Executive Officer Chad Hurley and Chief Technology Officer Steve Chen on Dec. 5, urging the company to take a more proactive approach in identifying and removing copyrighted material from the site. In the letter they asked for a reply no later than Dec. 15. "We haven't received a reply yet, but Dec. 15 has only just begun in the U.S.," said Kosuke Hayashi, a spokesman for JASRAC in Tokyo. "I don't think they'll ignore the letter and we might get something later in the [U.S. Pacific time] day." YouTube didn't respond late Thursday to a request for comment. Shortly after the letter was sent, YouTube confirmed in a brief statement that it had been received and was being reviewed. "Meanwhile we will continue to provide content companies in Japan and elsewhere with tools to easily notify us of unauthorized uses of their content so we can promptly remove it, in accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act," it said. At present YouTube deals with copyright infringement by asking rights holders to send complaints in written form by postal mail, e-mail or fax with details of the clips claimed to infringed copyright and other documents. The clips are then deleted if the documents sent satisfy YouTube as to the infringement claims. In their letter the Japanese rights holders called on YouTube to create an alternative to this procedure that would in part utilize technology to identify infringing clips as they are uploaded or published. It followed theÂ deletion by YouTube of almost 30,000 video clipsÂ in October after a group of content companies complained to the site. However, no sooner had the clips been deleted than new ones began appearing on the site to take their place. YouTube has been growing in popularity among Japanese Internet users. This has surprised some observers as the site doesn't offer a Japanese language interface or instructions. As part of their request the rights holders want YouTube to post a message on its home page in Japanese that warns against uploading copyrighted content. In addition to JASRAC, the other names on the letter include the Motion Picture Producers' Association of Japan, the Japan Video Software Association, the Association of Japanese Animations, all of the major commercial TV broadcasters, the Japan Satellite Broadcasting Association, the Recording Industry Association of Japan and Yahoo Japan.
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The government has agreed to unblock the popular video-sharing site after a flap involving videos mocking its king, saying YouTube has agreed in turn to block videos flagged as illegal.
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Blog: The video is safe, but the download mod it advertises is not.
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TEHRAN: Internet access to three websites close to Iranian&#39;s leading reformist party has been blocked by the authorities, prompting a protest by the party leader.
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&#160;China watchers, get your scorecards out: Google&#39;s YouTube is blocked,&#160;Wikipedia is still blocked, but, for the moment, Google blog site Blogspot.com is available and some pictures from Yahoo&#39;s Flickr photos can once again be viewed.
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U.S. President George W. Bush's official campaign Web site has blocked access to foreign Web surfers since Monday, an Internet monitoring company said Wednesday.
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The online video site had been blocked because it had carried material seen as insulting to the countryâs king.
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'Offensive' video saga part 24 Thailand's powers that be are considering a new block on certain "offensive" YouTube material after last month lifting its ban on the site, Reuters reports.â¦
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Web-surfers outside the US have been blocked from visiting the official George W. Bush campaign website. UK-based internet monitoring firm Netcraft first noticed the blockage Monday morning.
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More Ataturk attack malarkey Turkey has once again blocked access to YouTube for allegedly badmouthing the country's founding father Mustafa Kemal Ataturk.â¦