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[bacasper]

This can't be good.

First Amendment Under Attack � Feds Shut Down 73,000 Blogs

Under the provisions of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act passed in 1998 the Obama administration has shut down 73,000 blogs this week which were hosted on the Blogetery.com WordPress-based hosting service. Initially the target was a small group of sites which were involved in illegal file sharing, but ultimately a request was issued to BurstNet, Blogetery.com's hosting provider, to shut down the entire network of 73,000 blogs, most of which were engaged in no illegal activity, including harmless sites like Science Experiments for Kids and political sites like Tea and Politics.

This is the first use of the DMCA on this scale and it has frightening implications for the future. Under the act no warrant or any kind of due process is required because the government makes its request directly of the ISP involved and can penalize it administratively if it fails to comply. There is no standard for proof of illegal activity and the target of the action has no protection under the act. Many on both the right and left are concerned that this could lay the groundwork for the shut down of political sites critical of the administration, either arbitrarily or as part of some future campaign finance or net neutrality legislation.

It would be virtually impossible to run a site hosting service with any large membership without having some users engaging in some sort of questionable activity and it is unrealistic to expect a hosting company to police thousands of individual users. Critics of this action believe that first amendment rights and due process should be respected and that the burden of proof should fall on the government to identify and punish only the actual wrongdoers rather than shutting down thousands of innocent sites to get a few malefactors.

confirmation here

[ThingsComeAround]

Apparently the only way to kill ants is with a flamethrower

[bacasper]

In more censorship news this week, the fan page for Gary Franchi's (www.restoretherepublic.com) Don't Tread on Me: Rise of the Republic was removed from Facebook, and Alex Jones' The Obama Deception was removed from YouTube's Viral Video page despite its over 6 million hits. In some ways, this private (or for that matter, self-) censorship is worse than that by the government. Any way to redress that?

[Fox]

[mises]

http://news.cnet.com/8301-31001_3-20010923-261.html

[bacasper]

[TheUrbanMyth]

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US shuts down 80 more websites