Aussie bid to shut offensive site

The Australian Human Rights Commission has threatened legal action against a widely read but controversial US-based website over an article that it says encourages racial hatred against Aborigines.

But online rights group Electronic Frontiers Australia said trying to stamp out the deplorable content would only create the "Streisand" effect, whereby an attempt to censor online content only brings more attention to it.

In a letter to Joseph Evers, the owner of Encyclopedia Dramatica (ED) - a more shocking version of Wikipedia that contains racist and other offensive articles dubbed as "satire" - the Commission said it had received 20 complaints from Aborigines over the "Aboriginal" page on the site.

The same page was in the news in January when, in a rare move, Google Australia agreed to remove links to the article from its search engine following legal action from Aboriginal man Steve Hodder-Watt.

On the Australian Communication and Media Authority's blacklist of "refused classification" websites, which was leaked in March last year, encyclopediadramatica.com was included. This means the entire site will likely be blocked under the government's forthcoming internet filtering plan.

The Commission argued in its letter, the first page of which was published by Evers on his website, that the article on Aborigines constituted racial hatred and was in breach of the Racial Discrimination Act 1975.

A disclaimer at the top of the article, which is too vulgar to excerpt here, says it was "not racist at all" because it was written by "Australian aborigines who are satirizing racists in Australia in the same way that Sacha Baron Cohen, a jew, uses the character Borat to satirize anti-semetism (sic)".

A separate article on the site about Australia says the country is "comprised entirely of the still imprisoned distant relatives of Britain's worst criminals (tax dodging sheep f*****) and other detritus and a haven for aspiring international terrorists".

The page is illustrated with a picture of Josef Fritzl draped in an Australian flag. Fritzl was sentenced to life in prison for imprisoning and raping his children over a 24 year period.

Evers had argued in an email to the Commission that because his site was hosted in the US, it was covered by the country's free speech regulations and not subject to Australian laws.

In response to this, the Commission pointed to an internet defamation case heard in the High Court of Australia in 2002, where US publisher Dow Jones was found to have defamed an Australian resident, Joseph Gutnick, in an article on Barron's Online.

The highly controversial case was settled in 2004 with Dow Jones agreeing to pay Gutnick close to $600,000 in damages.

"In this case an article on a website available from a server in the USA was held to have been published in Australia where the article was available for viewing and where the readers downloaded the story," the Commission said in its letter.

"In light of this decision, it appears that the RDA [Racial Discrimination Act] is applicable to this matter."

In a blog post, prefaced with claims that Encyclopedia Dramatica was "a labor of love" and tips for readers to "eat a few grams of highly potent mushrooms" in Chichen Itza in Mexico, Evers said he feared legal action brought by the Commission against him personally.

"While I act in complete compliance with both the civil and criminal codes of the United States of America, and am assured the right of free speech according to our Constitution ... I can personally be jailed and fined for the violation of this law," Evers wrote.

"Encyclopedia Dramatica will never be censored in any way. We will keep publishing this content and our Australian users will be able to view it up until the point that your God-forsaken government blocks it with their soon-to-be-implemented secret list of banned material."

Evers said his lawyers had advised him to never visit his family in Sydney again or step foot on Australian soil.

The Commission refused to comment on the matter.

Colin Jacobs, spokesman for the online users' lobby group Electronic Frontiers Australia, said the article was "indefensible" but questioned whether Australian law could be used to take it down.

He said the Dow Jones v Gutnick case was different because it was a civil, not a criminal matter and Dow Jones had paying subscribers in Australia, so was found to be publishing here.

"EFA doesn't believe that because something is on the internet it should be immune from critical examination or legal redress. Defamation and anti-hate-speech laws have a place even when applied to online content," said Jacobs.

"[But] a costly and lengthy legal battle would only give these guys more publicity, and the day the case was won, the page would pop up on a web host in another country. Trying to stamp out this fire will just cause it to spread."

Jacobs referred to the Streisand effect, named after Barbra Streisand's unsuccessful attempt to sue a photographer for US$50 million in an effort to have an aerial photograph of her mansion removed from a photo collection.

Once word of the legal action leaked out, the image spread like wildfire on the internet and hundreds of thousands more people ended up seeing it than had originally been the case.

- © Fairfax NZ News