Wednesday, August 30, 2006

Blocking information on the Net is not easy

Croydonian has posted about a story in yesterday's Guardian which says the New York Times has blocked British readers from accessing this article. Hitting the link states:

"This Article Is Unavailable: On advice of legal counsel, this article is unavailable to readers of nytimes.com in Britain. This arises from the requirement in British law that prohibits publication of prejudicial information about the defendants prior to trial"

Having read the article by hitting the link I can't honestly say, like Croydonian, whether it is prejudicial or not. However, the way they've "blocked" it is stupidly easy to circumvent. As a result it can be read by doing a quick blogger search anyway.

1 comment:

Croydonian said...

I'm a bit surprised that it hasn't been a bigger story. Above and beyond my desire to read 'banned' material, the much bigger issue is where to draw the dividing line between freedom of speech and allowing information that is grossly prejudicial to a fre trial into the public domain. Traditionally the law on contempt was applied to over enthusiastic hacks who failed to include 'alleged' or to pepper their copy with inverted commas, but it seems to me that the villains of the peace now are our over-politicised and would-be media slut chief police officers.