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April 09, 2008
Brazil: Bye, Bye Wordpress
Apparently a Brazilian court has ordered all ISPs to block WordPress because one site on the blogging platform may have defamed a noted attorney there. I can't read Portuguese, so I can't give the full background of the story, but my contact Marcel Leonardi thinks the case will cause serious problems for bloggers in Brazil. This strikes me as the mother of all overinclusive (and ineffective) remedies, but as Jonathan Zittrain reminds us, a totally untrammeled internet is likely to provoke many blunt responses.
UPDATE: Here is Leonardi's take:
The story does not mention the address of the specific blog . . . but my contacts have already found out the problem - the blog was created by some unknown party and it was offensive to . . . one of the most famous . . . .attorneys in Brazil. . . . What saddens me the most is that some people . . . think this is an acceptable solution for defamation on the Internet - muting millions of voices because of one bad apple.
Posted by Frank Pasquale at April 9, 2008 07:28 PM
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Comments
This has already happened in Turkey - Wordpress has been blocked there for months because of alleged defamation.
Posted by: brett at April 10, 2008 06:45 PM
