EU Censorship News

The European Union strives to be a global leader in press freedom but faces challenges from member states that have criminal defamation and blasphemy laws, and have introduced counterterrorism measures, including mass surveillance.

The EU has made press freedom imperative in negotiating with candidate countries, but has been accused of failing to take strong action when member states renege on their press freedom commitments. Journalists working in the region are also affected by EU laws and policies, such as the trade secrets directive and access to information regulations.

A special report by the Committee to Protect Journalists

The European Union has launched an antitrust investigation against several large U.S. movie studios and Sky UK. The European Commission wants to abolish geographical restrictions and has sent a statement of objections over the geo-blocking practices of six major US film studios including Disney, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.

Due to licensing agreements designed to encourage lucrative monopolies, many movies and TV-series are only available online in a few selected countries, often for a limited period. The movie studios often restrict broadcasters and streaming services to make content widely available, a practice which the European Commission wants to stop.

Margrethe Vestager, EU Commissioner in charge of competition policy said:

European consumers want to watch the pay-TV channels of their choice regardless of where they live or travel in the EU. Our investigation shows that they cannot do this today, also because licensing agreements between the major film studios and Sky UK do not allow consumers in other EU countries to access Sky's UK and Irish pay-TV services, via satellite or online.

The geo-blocking practices are a thorn in the side of the European Commission who now hope to abolish these restrictions altogether. Under European rules consumers should be able to access the services of Sky and other service providers regardless of where they are located. At the moment, most online services block access to content based on the country people are located, something Sky and the movie studios also agreed on.

The Commission plans to end unjustified geo-blocking, which it describes as a discriminatory practice used for commercial reasons.

Sky UK and the six major studios will now have to respond to the concerns.

The editor of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo has said the magazine will no longer draw cartoons of the religious character Mohammed.

Laurent Sourisseau told news magazine, Stern , that the magazine had done its job and what it had set out to fulfil. The weekly magazine's editor, who is known as Riss, said:

We have drawn Mohammad to defend the principle that one can draw whatever they want. It is a bit strange though: we are expected to exercise a freedom of expression that no one dares to.

We've done our job. We have defended the right to caricature.

He told the German magazine he did not want to believe the magazine was possessed by Islam but maintained that he believed that they had the right to criticise all religions .

A French MP has started the ball rolling on internet censorship on the grounds that children need to be protected from X-rated sites.

MP Jean-Jacques Candelier of the Democratic and Republican Left said that he'd had enough of the scourge of freely available online pornography. He wrote to Laurence Rossignol, the Secretary of State for the Family, Elderly People and Adult Care, asking for the government to introduce an access code in France, meaning that adults who want to see pornographic content online must manually opt-in to gain entry.

Failing that, Candelier suggested a default blocking of all pornography online, a move he said was inspired by David Cameron's controversial internet filters that came into effect in the UK last year.

The MP told France TV Info:

I don't condemn the existence of these sites, but they have to be reserved for adults. We need to put in place a system of access codes that will be asked for every time someone tries to connect to these sites,

New rules for Internet providers across the European Union could eliminate adult website blocking in the U.K.

The telecoms single market rules, approved June 30, will go before the full European Parliament for a vote this fall. If the legislation gets a green light, it will trump existing national laws. Censorship provision were more laterly debated in Council on July 8.

Despite the best efforts of UK Conservatives in the Parliament, the EU-wide regulation will put an end to Internet service provider-level filters for adult content, which will mean new U.K. laws by the end of next year.

Currently in the U.K., the major ISPs give users the option to block pornography or gratuitous violence. Consumers are prompted to choose whether to turn on the blocking filter when they first use their Internet connection.

While an exception for parental blocking tools was debated, it was not included in the final text.

As reported yesterday, Malta's Justice and Culture Minister Owen Bonnici has announced new amendments to censorship laws, which he said make good on the Labour Party's promises in opposition to prevent the further criminalisation of artists and citizens based on archaic laws pertaining to obscenity.

Obscenity laws introduced in 1975 under a Labour government, which generically outlawed articles that unduly emphasised sex, crime, horror, cruelty and violence , will be repealed.

Pornography will now be defined as something which is made with the express aim to sexually arouse, and will be allowed to be distributed to adults, provided appropriate warnings will be given.

However examples of extreme pornography will be banned outright. These are defined as an act which threatens a person's life, an act which results in a person's severe injury, rape or a non-consensual sexual activity, sexual activity involving a human corpse, and any act involving a person an animal.

Speaking to MaltaToday, Andrew Sciberras, part of the legal team charged with assembling the new law, ensured that strong defenses are in place for however falls foul of these new amendments, and that each case will be allowed to be considered on a case-by-case basis.

Sciberras explained that the amendments are based on the British equivalent of the same laws, which he admitted were not without their controversy . He was referring specifically to the extreme porn laws , which led to protests following their introduction in the UK in 2008.

This law has proven to be problematic when it comes to, for example, pornography of the bondage-and-masochism (BDSM) genre, which while often suggestive of violent activity by definition, could also be presented in a fictionalized setting, and performed in a safe environment.

Sciberras added that in all cases, the context of the work in question -- be it visual or a work of literature -- will be considered in context to determine whether its worth is solely pornographic or not

Love is a 2015 France / Belgium drama by Gaspar Noé.
Starring Gaspar Noé, Aomi Muyock and Klara Kristin.

A sexual melodrama about a boy and a girl and another girl. It's a love story, which celebrates sex in a joyous way.

Gaspar Noé's new film Love has been given a 16 rating in France, despite a government 'recommendation' that it should receive an 18 rating.

The 3D drama, which features explicit sexual scenes, was originally rated 16, but the French culture minister Fleur Pellerin made the unusual move of interfering. Pellerin requested that there be a second review, given the sexual nature of the film. But despite this, the certificate remained the same.

The French directors' guild also stood by Noé and criticised Pellerin. The group said in a statement:

We have nothing to gain from being in the game of conservatism and puritanism. The 'moralisation' of works, the intimate friend of censorship, is a dangerous game. The filmmakers of ARP remain convinced that poetry, sexual as it is, [from] filmmaker Gaspar Noé, will remain a better educational source than that of porn debauchery permanently available on the internet.

Note that the 16 certificate in France is used for films towards the strong end of violence, and for those featuring softcore or else non pornographic real sex. The French 18 rating is reserved for hardcore pornography. UK 18 rated films not on the stronger end of the sex or violence spectrums are often 12 rated in France.

Wikipedia is campaigning against yet more censorial legislation from the EU. Wikepedia writes:

Absence of full Freedom of Panorama means we can't illustrate Wikipedia properly.

For more than a decade, volunteers have compiled countless facts and contributed millions of hours to build Wikipedia. Photographers have donated hundreds of thousands of photos to illustrate the articles.

The reason Wikipedia can freely depict public spaces in most of the countries in the European Union is that we enjoy full Freedom of Panorama . This is an exception to copyright that allows people to make and use photographs of public spaces without restriction, while at the same time protecting the architect's or visual artist's rights.

Now, the free use of many of these images is in danger by a proposal in the European Parliament . If the restrictive text accepted by the Legal Affairs Committee is adopted in the course of the upcoming EU legislative procedure on copyright reform, hundreds of thousands of images on Wikipedia would no longer be free and thus would no longer belong in Wikipedia.

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Less than a week after Iceland's prime minister contended that his nation's fundamental values would be at risk should the insurgent Pirate Party ever come to power, the group has celebrated its first legislative success, the decriminalization of blasphemy.

Birgitta Jonsdottir , one of three Pirates in the Althing, Iceland's Parliament, was among party activists celebrating the vote in favor of their bill to repeal the prohibition on impious irreverence, which had been in force since 1940.

The measure to repeal the law , which made ridiculing or insulting the dogmas or worship of a lawfully existing religious community an offense punishable by a fine or up to three months in jail, was introduced in January , in the wake of the murderous attack in Paris on Charlie Hebdo.

While the vote was underway in the Althing, The Iceland Monitor reported , all three of the party's members took the floor to say, I am Charlie. After the bill was made law, the party said in a statement , The Icelandic Parliament has issued the important message that freedom will not bow to bloody attacks.

The European Union has said an exception to net neutrality rules, covering spam filtering and blocking porn, was part of its new compromise deal.

The deal included four instances when net neutrality rules need not be applied.

One of the four exceptions was filtering spam as well as allowing parents to set up parental filters that block pornography or gratuitous violence from children.

However, the commission now admits that this exemption was announced before it was actually agreed.

The three other exceptions were the blocking of illegal content; preventing the misuse of networks, for instance viruses, malware or denial of service attacks; and finally to minimise network congestion that is temporary or exceptional .

However tech websites have suggested that the EU exemptions may undermine net neutrality. See The EU Could Kill Net Neutrality With a Loophole from wired.com