Out-Law newsletter says IWF "was wrong to lift its ban on a Wikipedia page"

[Ian Batten]

On 12 Dec 2008, at 19:56, Peter Tomlinson wrote:

> See http://www.out-law.com/page-9653.
>
> From the information posted to ukcrypto, the Out-Law article is  
> factually incorrect in several places. It also fails to address the  
> problem of many other web pages that include the same image.


I think the basic thrust, though, that if it's illegal then it should  
be on the IWF's list, and the creation of a new class of ``known to  
the IWF, believed to be illegal per PoCA 1978, but not blocked for  
reasons which are not defences under that act'' will turn out to have  
unintended consequences, is correct.

I think that, as constituted, the IWF should operate as close to  
possible to an oracle for the PoCA: the class of errors it makes  
should be classifying as illegal things that are not, and failing to  
classify as illegal things that are.  End of.  A single decision,  
legal/illegal with a single outcome, block if illegal, no-block if not- 
illegal.  What they've done is to to create three outputs instead of  
two (legal, illegal/block, illegal/not-block --- I'm assuming they  
won't try legal/block) and they can now make the extra error of  
judging illegal what is actually legal, but then not blocking it.  All  
without governance.

ian