Corporate culture industry exploits child abuse for political gain

Portrait of Johan Schlüter, the Danish lawyer who said child pornography is "great" for the culture industry

Christian Engström, a Swedish MEP for the Pirate Party, reports how a Danish anti-piracy lawyer explained at an American Chambers of Commerce seminar in 2007 that the music and film industries were cynically exploiting the sexual abuse of children for political gain.

“Child pornography is great,” said Johan Schlüter, a lawyer for the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, at the event in Stockholm. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites.”

The Anti-Piracy Group is a corporate lobbying organisation, like the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI) or the Music Publishers Association (MPA).

“One day we will have a giant filter that we develop in close cooperation with IFPI and MPA. We continuously monitor the child porn on the net, to show the politicians that filtering works. Child porn is an issue they understand,” added Schlüter.

This strategy has worked well for the culture industry, especially in Schlüter’s home of Denmark, where viewing of the torrent site The Pirate Bay is blocked. In Sweden, the police decided to also add the Pirate Bay to a list of sites blocked because it contained child pornography. They did not contact the Pirate Bay about this, and produced no evidence that the Pirate Bay in fact did contain such material. When the list of blocked sites was leaked there was an uproar, and the police were forced to admit that they had no evidence for the claim. As a result, the Pirate Bay is not blocked in Sweden.

At an EU level, the Swedish European Commissioner Cecilia Malmström last month introduced a directive to create a European wide censorwall, that would create a list of sites that would be blocked by ISPs across Europe. Although this is probably motivated by a genuine concern to end the distribution of illegal and abhorrent material online, there’s little doubt that it would soon be exploited by the powerful corporate lobbyists of the culture industry. What’s potentially even more worrying is the possibility that such a list could be used in times of crisis to muzzle political dissent.

The best known example of this is the “great firewall of China“, which is the huge list of sites that the Chinese government attempts to block its own people from being able to see, mainly to suppress opposition. Less well known is that Australia is implementing a similar list of banned sites which is kept secret from the public. However, a leak of the list revealed that, while it did contain many sites that showed abuse and horrific imagery, it also contained wikipedia entries, the website of a tour operator and that of a Queensland dentist.

While many of us could agree that we’re against censorship of the internet in principle, that of course leaves the real issue of the distribution of images of abuse online, something which everyone can agree must be stopped. However, the tragic irony of the way that corporate lobbyists are cynically exploiting this suffering for their own ends is that their proposals actually do little to stop real abuse.

As an experienced internet user will know, it’s really easy to get round a filter or block by using proxy servers. This is how folk outside the UK, who don’t pay a licence fee, watch stuff on iplayer for example. More than that, the web has been found to be one of the less important ways of distributing images of abuse. Paedophiles, aware that there are sophisticated police units tracking their activity, usually use much harder to trace peer 2 peer systems like bittorrent, or even just by emailing stuff to each other.

The best solutions to what to do about the problem have come from organisations of abuse survivors themselves. Mogis e.V. is a German organisation for abuse survivors who oppose internet censorship. They argue that not only will censorwalls damage the internet, they also are an abdication of the responsibility to actually deal with the problem. Their slogan is ‘Remove, don’t block! Act, don’t look away!’

They argue that just blocking sites is similar to people in the offline world who pretend abuse isn’t happening. The real problem is that children are being abused, and it is the duty of governments and police to track down and prosecute the people responsible. Instead of blocking sites, they argue that police should find sites that truly do contain images of abuse, which are internationally recognised as illegal, and actually remove them from the internet, rather than just blocking them. They should also find the perpetrators and bring them to justice.

What you see if you look at a blocked site in Australia

This is a far more sophisticated strategy for actually taking action to end real abuse. The reason it is not more popular among governments is that, controlled as they are by capitalist interests, many lawmakers who don’t really understand technology just take their advice from corporate lobbyists. And as these representatives of capitalism have proved themselves, their main interest is not actually preventing abuse, but using it as a Trojan horse to block sites that in fact have nothing to do with child abuse. If there were to be a regime of actually tracking these sites, proving which ones were distributing material that everyone agrees is abhorrent and illegal, and removing them from the internet, the culture industry would find it much harder to justify taking down sites like The Pirate Bay to governments and the public.