Censorship
Argentina is not individually classified by the OpenNet Initiative, but is included in the ONI regional overview for Latin America.
Technical filtering of the Internet is uncommon in Argentina. The regulation of Internet content addresses largely the same concerns and strategies seen in North America and Europe, focusing on combating the spread of child pornography and restricting child access to age-inappropriate material. As Internet usage in Argentina increases, so do defamation, hate speech, copyright, and privacy issues.
Prosecutors and police pursue cases of Internet child pornography. In June 2008 the Congress passed a law criminalizing child pornography; however, the law does not penalize possession by individuals for personal use.
Since the 1997 presidential declaration regarding “Free Speech on the Internet” that guarantees Internet content the same constitutional protections for freedom of expression, Argentina has become a haven for neo-Nazi and race-hate groups around the region. In 2000 an Argentine appellate court affirmed a lower court’s dismissal of a claim that a Yahoo! site selling Nazi memorabilia violated Argentina’s anti-discrimination law (no. 23.592), holding that the equivalent restrictions of non-Internet speech would be unacceptable.
Under Argentina’s anti-discrimination law a crime is aggravated if racism is involved.
The defendant in the 2006 case Jujuy.com v. Omar Lozano was found liable for publishing slanderous content on his Web site after imputing adulterous conduct to a couple and failing to remove the content promptly. An injunction was imposed and damages were set at $40,000 (USD).
Argentina has strengthened intellectual property rights protections by drafting and updating laws and ratifying international agreements such as the WIPO Copyright Treaty.
In August 2011 a judge ordered all ISPs to block the site LeakyMails, a Web site that obtains and publishes documents exposing corruption in Argentina.
In 2011 some internet service providers blocked the website IP address 216.239.32.2 which is linked to more than one million blogs hosted on Google's Blogger service disrupting the access to all of them.
Read more about this topic: Telecommunications In Argentina, Internet
Famous quotes containing the word censorship:
“The censorship method ... is that of handing the job over to some frail and erring mortal man, and making him omnipotent on the assumption that his official status will make him infallible and omniscient.”
—George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950)
“... censorship often boils down to some male judges getting to read a lot of dirty books—with one hand.”
—Robin Morgan (b. 1941)
“... a phallocentric culture is more likely to begin its censorship purges with books on pelvic self-examination for women or books containing lyrical paeans to lesbianism than with See Him Tear and Kill Her or similar Mickey-Spillanesque titles.”
—Robin Morgan (b. 1941)