No Clean Feed - Stop Internet Censorship in Australia

Category Archives: Free Speech

Where bad arguments go to be mocked

I’ve always found the various attempts to argue for the burqa or niqab as liberating rather than constricting and deeply misogynistic to be a steaming pile. Clearly the people at newsbiscuit agree. Some highlights: New laws in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates will require that every Blackberry user dress their phone a miniature [...]

Protect teh Kiddies

I attended a religious school for the first three years of High School. I’m afraid that it went in one ear and out the other, because I didn’t even realise that Jesus was God according to Christian doctrine until I was about 25. I have a fantastic ability to be able to switch off during [...]

More on cyberbullying

[Cross-posted at The Fortnightly Review of IP and Media Law - please check this excellent resource out] In a follow-up to my post on cyber-bullying, the Australian government are intending to amend the Sex Discrimination Act 1984 (Cth) in an attempt to deal with the phenomena of cyber-bullying and “sexting”. 1. Current provisions of the [...]

The Noble Experiment

Until I came to do the research for my MPhil, I didn’t realise that Prohibition — that great failed exercise in mass planning — was also known back in the day as ‘the noble experiment’. I learnt of the alternative moniker through Daniel Okrent’s superb history — Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition. [...]

The magic of the word

When I was studying medieval Celtic history, I read somewhere that the early Irish believed that writing something down was a kind of magic, and various stories feature inscriptions in ogham, which assist the writers to find people, mark things as owned by a particular person, and to send magical messages. The early Irish were [...]

Hoist by their own petard

I think it’s fair to say that Heath G and I share an obsession with fantastically unsuccessful defamation actions that result in the very opposite outcome to that which the plaintiff sought to achieve. At Minimal State, Heath has a post about the best one yet, involving a hapless company named T & J Towing: [...]

NB: Lawyers are not scientists, please stop trying to recruit us

Elsewhere, I’ve pointed out that good lawyers are perfectly capable of ‘doing’ science, or history, or [insert non-legal academic discipline here]. That we can do it, however, doesn’t mean we ought to do it (see what I did there?). That this may be the developing common sense of the profession is evidenced in part by yesterday’s [...]

Offence, the Net and the Law

“I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it” (Evelyn Beatrice Hall, biographer of Voltaire) Disapproving of what someone says but defending their right to say it is sometimes very hard. It sounds fine in principle…until you see something that is really challenging to your ideas [...]

Ari and Mohammed are now friends

The Israeli military cancelled a planned raid on a Palestinian village after one of its soldiers posted details of the operation on Facebook. The unnamed soldier revealed the time and place of the raid and the name of his unit on the social networking site. He said on his status update that his unit planned [...]

Sunday Funnie and Open Discussion Thread

Iran’s supreme leader has denied it is developing nuclear weapons, after a new report from the UN atomic watchdog, the IAEA, sparked an international outcry. Ayatollah Ali Khamenei said any fears were “baseless” as Iranians’ beliefs “bar us from using such weapons”. The blunt report raised concerns Iran was working on nuclear weapons. Russia said [...]