blog censorship in greece?
greece is a democracy and yet most of the times it's easy to abuse the democracy we have. a couple of days ago the owner/administrator of www.blogme.gr had to suspend the website and was taken to court. why?
background:
the site (www.blogme.gr) has RSS feeds to all its bloggers'/subscribers' blogs, and therefore you can see (or rather, could see) the headlines of all blogs on its homepage. one of the blogs wrote something unpleasant/of satyrical context for a public person, who happened to see it somehow, and issued proceedings against the owner (!!!) of blogme.gr for defamation and other relevant (or irrelevant) allegations. The name of the person who issued the proceedings has not been made public yet, but i imagine that it would probably be one of the following: celebrity/politician/journalist (this is possible in my view)/sports professional/someone from the business world or anyone else who wants to prove to the world how important they are by not allowing people to mention their name on a blog posting. disclaimer: this is the summary of the case according to my understanding of all postings i read about it online.
the law regarding publications in greece applies to the internet as well, roughly meaning that according to law i cannot write whatever i wish on my blog, if it were to offend anyone. but there's (at least) several problems with the court proceedings that are now starting against the owner of blogme.gr:
1. a person who has rss feeds on their site, cannot control/monitor what comes through the feeds. if you want to sue someone, that would have to be the publisher of the original posting. this is as ridiculous as taking google to court for bringing up a page spreading false rumours about someone famous, on a google search.
2. there are thousands of blogs ran by people who are anonymous or who use a nickname or even their real name. and even in the case of the real name, you could always argue that there's someone else using this name (just because someone is using my name on the internet it doesn't mean it's me, does it? i could be signing this blog using literally any name on earth). how can you really trace who's writing what, even if you want to?
3. blogging and the internet are free in most of the world, but it seems that with these criminal proceedings now there is some tendency to monitor and censor blogging in greece (!?!?!?!?!)! this is absolutely shocking to me. technically speaking, since the internet falls within the premises of the law regulating publications, the proceedings could be successful. what happens after that, i wouldn't want to imagine. is this a new era of censorship?
4. it is not yet known who the person who sued blogme.gr is, and i don't know what was written against them. i can imagine it's unpleasant to see something bad about yourself on the internet, but if you are a celebrity in this country (greece), you have probably seen all the defamation you can handle, already on tv and the papers. i simply do not understand why you would turn against someone who runs their own blog as a means of expressing their opinion. (possibly because you can't sue a tv channel that easily but you can do so with an individual who cannot defend themselves as well?) i understand that the issue is that this opinion is expressed publicly, but if you take my blog for example, my writing style is more what i would say to my friends (most of the times). i should be expecting my own notifications soon, then.
5. i am also surprised the issue has not hit mainstream greek (and not only) media, although it has been around for the past 2 days.
in any case we enjoy talking about freedom of expression in greece, and because of that we have ended up tolerating all sorts of crap on tv and on our newspapers. but because of that we also enjoy and boast being able to share opinions and try to move on. we take pride in our democracy, even though it has lots of flaws and is being constantly abused. in my view, if the proceedings are successful, this introduces a new era of censorship and takes us many, many years back in time.
it's a disgrace.




4 Comments:
Eloquently put; one of the best posts in written in english so far about the Blogme.gr case. We need more of those, people!
Unbelievable. People are trashed every day on the utter disgrace that is Greek television, and yet an individual gets arrested for something he didn't write and doesn't own. Only in Greece my friends, only in Greece.
that's one of the points in this whole case. as the internet is under the publications law, republishing=publishing. and since the person offended cannot trace the publisher, he will attack the person who republished. although RSS does not have the same attributes as republishing on the press, since you are not processing anything or filtering. this is all a ridiculous thing.
Σε χαιρετούμε και αν και καθυστερημένα σ ευχριστούμε για το ενδιαφέρον. Φυσικά ξέριες και την υπόλοιπη ιστορία, το μηνυτή και ΓΙΑΤΙ η κατ' εξαίρεση αυτή αστυνομική επιχείρηση. Ο κ. αυτός πολύ γνωστός ακροδεξιός τερατολόγος κινδυνολόγος δεν έχει κρύψει ποτέ τους ισχυρούς φίλους του.
Επίσης, οι απειλές επικυρήξεις εναντίον μας είναι πραγματικότατες. Δεν φοβόμαστε το νόμο ούτε τη δικαιοσύνη. ΟΙ ΥΠΟΓΕΙΕΣ ΜΕΘΟΔΟΙ κυρίου να άρει το απορρητο των προσωπικών δεδομένων μας, είναι οι επικίνδυνες και γι αυτό ενημερώνουμε όποιον μπορούμε για τον υπαρκτό κίνδυνο της φυσικής μας ακεραιότητας.
Ευχαριστούμε και στη διάθεσή σας.
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