AU Internet Censorship Spells Bad News For Gamers

eldavojohn writes "Kotaku is running an investigative piece examining what internet censorship means for games in Australia. Australia has some of the most draconian video game attitudes in the world, and the phrase 'refused classification' should strike fear in game developers and publishers looking to market games there. Internet censorship may expand this phrase to mean that anybody hosting anything about the game may suffer censorship in AU. Kotaku notes, 'This means that if a game is refused classification (RC) in Australia — like, say, NFL Blitz, or Getting Up — content related to these games would be added to the ISP filter. [This would bring up] a range of questions, foremost of those being: what happens when an otherwise harmless website ... hosts material from those games (screenshots, trailers, etc) that is totally fine in the US or Japan or Europe, but that has been refused classification in Australia?' Kotaku received a comment from the Australian Department of Broadband Communication promising that the whole website won't be blocked, just the material related to the game (videos, images, etc). Imagine maintaining that blacklist!"

The silver lining

[Barny]

The upshot of this whole thing is of course that our jobless rate is going to evaporate as we are going to need that chunk of the the population to surf the net and flag possible bad content.

Political action

[H0D_G]

I encourage every member of Slashdot to donate to Gamers 4 Croydon. Gamers for Croydon is a political party running against atkinson in his home seat in an attempt to raise awareness about the R18+ restriction on games and to oppose mandatory internet filtering. Seriously, go donate and spread the word

http://www.gamers4croydon.org/ [gamers4croydon.org]

Seeing what over Au goverment departments have...

[HJED]

This is especially worrying when you realise how corrupt the government in Australia is, I recently came to realised this when I found out that the Department of Education in NSW block access to ALL search engines accept google for students at public primary and high schools. (apart from yahoo which you can get one page of results from if you go to search.yahoo.com)

Subject

[Ihmhi]

So first Britain treats 1984 like an instruction manual, and now Australia is treating Equilibrium [wikipedia.org] like a How-To film?

This game has been rated EC-10.

Re:Third World solution: disobey the law

[Opportunist]

OMG! They want to make the internet like TV. TV is 100 channels and nothing on, internet will be a billion webpages and nothing on (at least nothing you could see anymore).