Britain's broadband censors: a bunch of students
http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/broadband/370561/britains-broadband-censors-a-bunch-of-students

"If there’s any doubt" - Yeah right. What they really mean is "If someone dangerous complains".

"In those cases [pornography], it takes a human to take a look at it" - So... their job description is basically to watch porn all day.

They also mention that they censor politics that they consider to be "the extreme left or right"

"Normally, the entire site would be banned, not only the offending page" (except for a few large & famous sites)

"The lists aren't made public, and McAfee doesn't notify sites when they're added, so it's difficult to know which are blocked unless you're using the service." - Well actually, it's nearly impossible to know, even if you do use the service, except the ones you specifically know about and test.

"would never publish the full list for intellectual property reasons." - So what percentage of the URLs on your blacklist do you own the intellectual property for? what fraction is original material?

"database rights"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_right

You can't copyright facts, but you can copyright a particular collection of facts (a database) such as a telephone directory or a web directory or an anti-web-directory

Well, it's not really "fact". More like "opinion" in this case.


Of which this is an example. The only <0.1% of the work that is "new" is that they are under categories.

Each listed URL is a 'fact' -- a pre-existing piece of information that they didn't themselves create.

The blacklist is a 'database' -- work, time, opinions, etc have gone into compiling it and (worthy or not) that makes it eligible for copyright protection.

However if the list is never published then it's intellectual property of a different kind, a trade secret. Copyright over a trade secret is irrelevant because very few people are given the opportunity to infringe, and those few who do have access to the list will have signed a confidentiality agreement.

oh yay, automated censorship!

</sarcasm>