flickr-censorship – what to do

I got victimized by flickr censorship. My photos are still there, but I cannot see the photos by Jake Applebaum anymore. Well, not only I, but anybody from China, Germany and Austria. Lucky me, in Hong Kong you get thrown into jail when you look at art photographs done by Jake.

A post by Xeni Jardin on BoingBoing.net explains how Jake got on the censored photos list:

… I blogged about the case of Oiwan Lam, a well-known blogger in Hong Kong (Links: 1, 2, 3, 4) who’s facing the possibility of a year in jail or a $HK 400,000 fine for having linked to an image deemed offensive by authorities. That image (a non-pornographic, artistic nude) was shot and published by none other than Jake Appelbaum, whose work has been blogged here on BoingBoing many times. …
Oiwan … blames the photo-sharing site’s recently implemented content rating/blocking system in part for the legal situation she now faces in Hong Kong.
Jake believes the program, as implemented, amounts to censorship…

Jake explained the background at said blogpost.

Think global, now the local trouble: I cannot look at the pictures of a person, whom I met personally sometime and who’s work I admire. Here is a pic I took of Jake when we were out eating with other friends in Vienna:
Jake

And now, when I click on Jake’s photos, flickr tells me
ioerror doesn't have any photos available to you. Take me home.

Aeeehhhhmmm. Well, ioerror indeed has photos available for me and I would be interested to see them. So, the social networking website flickr removed the social networking for me. But Gunnar, who sits in office in opposite of me, is not affected by the censorship, because he is Norwegian.
My flickr account will expire tomorrow, and I am so angry about this that I don’t plan continue it. But then you won’t see my sets and pictures anymore and, alas, out of anger nothing good can come.

Any suggestions welcome, I could shutdown my flickr account and move to zooomr (well, maybe not, its a one-man-show) or to smugmug, I could make a new flickr account using a fake id from Norway, etc etc… whats the right thing to do?

To be prepared, I already backed up my whole flickr account, including all comments and tags of the photos in RDF.

One Reply to “flickr-censorship – what to do”

  1. For a long time for better or worse the web was a domain of free expression. I think what we’re seeing here is the beginning of a period in which the state tries to control what people can or can’t view on the internet. China has been leading the way in this regard, but it’s a trend which seems to be playing out in all countries.

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