Some fuss has been made over here in the UK when yesterday, many of our ISPs began filtering Wikipedia content. The controversy encircles a 1976 album cover for German Heavy Metal band, The Scorpions, depicting a naked prepubescent girl on the front of their “Virgin Killer” sleeve. The UK’s Internet Watch Foundation says it could be illegal and have added the image to their child-pornography black list.

Internet commentary is alight with arguments of hypocrisy and futility in banning access to an image that is ready available for sale as the cover of the in-print album in question. The image has apparently been reproduced in a number of books also, some of which available from the British Library itself.

Want to see the image in question? Not a problem. Just jump to Amazon where you can not only see what all the fuss is about, but even purchase the album. The image was originally censored with a carefully positioned jewel-case crack and airbrushed nipples, but was still banned in many countries.

The six major UK ISPs are apparently routing Wiki traffic through transparent proxies which makes it impossible for Wikipedia admins to control site abuse. A single IP proxy address may represent an ISPs entire user-base and blocking it would effectively block edit access to all users. By not blocking it, malicious users would have free reign.

Over in London, I can confirm that Virgin Media have blocked access to the page in question, making it seem as if the page failed to load. Also, after a look at a few BitTorrent sites, it’s clear that the maelstrom created by the futile filtering has only served to heighten interest in the band.

UPDATE:

The Wikipedia page is back up. With the original image. Strangely, both Amazon.com and Amazon.co.uk have removed the image from their product pages.

Sources:

ZDNet and The Register and BBC

Via: Slashdot