The Volokh Conspiracy

Great. This is going to be pretty broad, too, since it is now established in French law that criticism of Muslim animal sacrifice by animal rights activists constitutes "racial hatred". France sure has lost its grip on liberte.

Racial hatred? Based on flags by internet users? I'm trying to think which is more frightening... flagging by the public (I can see people with dynamic IP addresses switching constantly to flag and reflag a site) or flagging by government bureacrats.

A.W.: You and the rest of hardcore conservatives have nothing to worry about from level headed people such as myself. I am perfectly comfortable for claiming G.W. Bush is smothering my freedoms, and Mark Steyn, certain Islamic groups and certain liberal groups are hate mongering. Now excuse me while I go and stare in the miror accusing myself of hate mongering.

I'm certain the French internet users will be perfectly reasonable about what they flag as racial hatred.

Ce serait tout ce qui n'est pas en francais?

Ce serait tout ce qui n'est pas en francais?

Mais bien sur.

I wonder if this means you can now keep French people off your web site simply by embedding metatags that say "cheese eating surrender monkeys" on every page.

I may have to come up with a new France-only EULA for my site. The Canadian one has worked out fine so far.

yeah, it is simply impossible to know what is child porn. why not block all pornography-make the world of the internet a better place.

Actually, one of the problems of determining what is child porn to which I meant to refer is what to do with pictures of small children in the nude but not engaged in any sort of sexual activity. Many American and European families, for example, let small children swim and run around the beach in the nude. Their family vacation photos include what for them are perfectly innocent photos of the kids in the nude. Such people have been arrested and even prosecuted on the basis of such photos. If you really want to eliminate all "pornography", you'll have to filter all images of people not fully covered. If you're the most extreme sort of Muslim this may be acceptable, but it isn't for the rest of us.

Foolsmate,

Your link is broken (the LA Times website says the page is unavailable). However, I believe you are referring to this story about Judge Kozinski and the porn he posted on his official website.

Can environmentalism now be classified as "racial hatred"? After all, most environmentalists feel that there are too many people on the Earth and a cursory look at birth rates has all the developing world at the top of the list. They think there are too many brown kids in the world - that's racial hatred.

Dave N
Thanks for providing the correct link -- that is indeed the one. I am not suggesting Kozinski committed any crimes. I do think the following passages, if correctly quoted, show mendacity about the accidental uploading of images degrading to women. That is just not credible.

Kozinski said he would delete some material from his site, including the photo depicting women as cows, which he said was "degrading . . . and just gross." He also said he planned to get rid of a graphic step-by-step pictorial in which a woman is seen shaving her pubic hair.

Kozinski said he must have accidentally uploaded those images to his server while intending to upload something else. "I would not keep those files intentionally," he said. The judge pointed out that he never used appeals court computers to maintain the site.

let's see-since you can't distinguish between a child at the beach and a child/adult being raped, any sewage is appropriate for on-line content. sorry, I'll take my chances with the possibility of that slippery slope.

You should probably be less concerned about whether the Bill Posers of the world can make this distinction and more concerned about the Mike Nifongs or other politically motivated prosecutors can (or are willing to).

It has become clear to me that the well-intentioned fight against cp is the perfect issue for the pushing of all kinds of agendas. Much has been tried, often successfully, to use the scare factor of this issue to abridge basic liberties: censorship, retroactive laws, draconian punishment, exemptions to the 4th, 5th and 6th amendments and more. It is a fact that the issue has been used as the entry point to many slippery slopes. When children are involved, people tend to lose their sense of proportion. Most important however, is the fact that the public can not legally check the veracity of the many alarmists pronouncements since no one can legally inform themselves what is actually counted as cp and how the numbers are generated.

Slightly odd that the article refers to Alliot-Marie as a "he." :-\

it's clear that france is just trying to reserve more bandwith for jerry lewis movies.