Also, as a matter of interest: when you say ‘freedom of speech’ on the Internet, are you referring just to the written word, in things like this, blog posts, comments, forum posts, etc? Or anything at all on the Internet? And if it’s the latter (or, to some extent, the former) why should the Internet be regulated any differently to the ‘real world’?

As I mentioned further down this thread, many controversial books nowadays come shrink-wrapped or cannot be sold to minors. These books are not, and never should be banned, but protocols are in place to ensure that, as far as is reasonable, they meet with their intended audience.

‘Don’t like it, don’t read it’ is, again, a sensible attitude that any sensible person sensibly follows, but it again doesn’t afford protection to minors as is. Could we not adopt this attitude towards movies, for example, and do away with certification? After all, if you don’t like violence and sex, you don’t have to buy a ticket or rent the DVD.

Where as always this stuff becomes a very gray area is that while we perhaps assume that most adults make reasonable decisions, it isn’t really them we’re concerned about. While I personally don’t have much of a problem with children being exposed to moderate levels of violence and indeed nudity in films (and TV, etc), there, once again, has to be a ceiling. One would like to think that parents would make the right decisions for their children but blatantly many do not.

Prosecution is not the answer – on this we are very much in agreement. But that kind of content being openly available to all and sundry is not, in my opinion, the best way forward, either. There needs to be some manner of regulation, particularly so if the supporters of free speech aren’t, in many cases, even going to bother reading what they’re so concerned about supporting.

It’s one of my favourite books, but again if we restrict the rental of movies and video games to minors I’m not sure why the printed word should be any different.

If you’re talking simply about words on paper then as I said I agree with the sentiment. My point was, and remains, that Mark had not read the story, and I imagine neither have several other contributors to this discourse. All I am saying is to make fair and reasonable judgement on whether something is acceptable then you should be familiar with the material. Just waving the ‘freedom of speech’ flag over everything without having any real idea of what is being said is a rather silly approach to life.

if people are arguing for free speech regarding a sexually oriented story are they advocating the ability to produce material that promotes killing/bombing/terrorist acts….

The key issue here is that at the end of the day, the words themselves don’t build bombs or kill people, any more than the knife takes it upon itself to stab someone, or the gun decides to pull it’s own trigger. Words are just tools (albeit very powerful ones) and the ultimate responsibility for any action that uses these tools lies with the USER and the choices they made.

Jon…

“We are banning newspapers from x, y and z, because we feel it would undermine the authority of the courts to have it generally know that Tony and that mad judge got together for such perverse acts.”

“We are banning that because anyone who buys it will know how to nitrate a T-shirt, therefore is a terrorist. We are adding these chemistry books to our list of illegal writings.”

With USA, UK and AU all going down this path, we are looking tobe monitored and watched in EVERY SINGLE activity in the years to come.

And we might only be looking at two years. Not twenty.