December 8th, 2008
British ISPs block Wikipedia over album cover
We’re accustomed to the Internet being censored in China and other repressive regimes. But it’s a bit disconcerting when Great Firewall techniques come to the U.K. At issue is the Wikipedia page for the Scorpions’ album Virgin Killer, which features the nude image of a young girl with a glass crack covering her genitals. (This is the toned down version; the original is in full color.)
That page is no longer available to most British users, after the Internet Watch Foundation, Britain’s child porn watchdog, identified the page as a “potentially indecent image of a child.”
IWF listed on the page on its watchlist, to which most of the U.K.’s ISPs subscribe, with the result that the page is largely unavailable in Britain. All this over an image that has been in wide commercial circulation on album and CD covers since its release in 1976.
For those of thus who can still read the page, here’s a little backstory on the image:
We didn’t actually have the idea. It was the record company. The record company guys were like, ‘Even if we have to go to jail, there’s no question that we’ll release that.’ On the song ‘Virgin Killer’, time is the virgin killer. But then, when we had to do the interviews about it, we said ‘Look, listen to the lyrics and then you’ll know what we’re talking about. We’re using this only to get attention. That’s what we do.’ Even the girl, when we met her fifteen years later, had no problem with the cover. Growing up in Europe, sexuality, of course not with children, was very normal. The lyrics really say it all. Time is the virgin killer. A kid comes into the world very naive, they lose that naiveness and then go into this life losing all of this getting into trouble. That was the basic idea about all of it.
In the war against kiddie porn, we have rolled the clock back to pre-Miller levels. Back in the day, it was Post Office officials who were the self-appointed regulators of decency. At least they were government officials whose actions had some relationship on their official duties.
In the Miller decision, since modified, the U.S. Supreme Court held that the government couldn’t censor images that had serious scientific, literary, artistic, or political value as judged by applying contemporary community standards. This image clearly has artistic merit and was used in an artistic product. The fact that it is controversial doesn’t show any lack of such merits. Although the court held in Ferber that images of children engaged in sexual activity could be banned, in Ashcroft v. Free Speech Coalition, the Court ruled that such bans couldn’t include Constitutionally protected speech.
Putting this all together, I would argue that no U.S. government could ban this album cover, but a business collective, such as IWF, on the lookout for any child nudity of any form, no matter the context, need only coordinate ISP efforts to reconstitute the tyranny of decency it took courts decades to tear down.
