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Deutsch: Finnland: Sperre heimischer Webseiten rechtswidrig

The Helsinki Administrative Court has ruled that domestic websites may not be placed on the secret blocking blacklist maintained by the police.

This is the latest turn in a long legal fight by Finnish activist Matti Nikki, whose website lapsiporno.info (translates as "childporn.info") was put on the secret blacklist in February 2008 and has remained on the list ever since.

The Finnish blocking blacklist is based on a law passed in 2006 that allows the police to create and maintain a secret list of websites in order to prevent access to child pornography on foreign websites. The blacklist is distributed to Internet service providers (ISPs), who may direct attempts to access blacklisted sites to a page which says access is blocked due to the child pornography blocking list. Using the secret blacklist is optional for ISPs, but the Communications Minister at the time, Suvi Linden, made public statements in 2008 that if the ISPs did not start using the list voluntarily, it would be made mandatory. After an initial wave of adoption, the list has been silently falling into disuse.

Nikki criticized the secret blacklist vocally, and discovered a large part of the secret list by trying to load websites that he found links to. When he published the list of websites he had discovered to be blocked, police accused him of distributing child pornography and eventually put his website on the secret blacklist.

One of Nikki's findings was that the top five Google search results for "gay porn" were all blacklisted, even though there was nothing related to children on the sites. Other brilliant highlights from the secret blacklist include www.w3.org (yes, the World Wide Web Consortium!) and the memorial page of a deceased Thai princess. An officer of the Central Criminal Police famously quipped "Google is a browser" when asked why Google is not blacklisted even though its search results contained the same links for which Nikki's pages were placed on the blacklist.

Nikki appealed to the Administrative Court about his website being on the secret blacklist. The Administrative Court ruled in May 2009 that it was not possible to complain about being on the blacklist. Nikki appealed to the Supreme Administrative Court, which ruled in September 2010 that indeed it was possible to complain about being on the list and thus cleared the way for complaints by Nikki and others who thought their sites had been put on the list without a valid basis.

The case was returned to the Administrative Court, which has now ruled that domestic sites may not be placed on the list. However, the court did not rule on whether Nikki's site could be blocked if it were abroad. Thus, legal uncertainty continues as to precisely what kinds of websites may be blocked.

One of the three judges filed a dissenting opinion to the ruling. In his view, lapsiporno.info is circumventing the law by "distributing foreign child porn via a website in Finland". Nikki's site does not in fact distribute child pornography in any way. It only contains domain names from the secret blocking list, all of which appear to host legal content. Out of nearly a thousand domain names that Nikki found to be on the blocking list, only a dozen seemed to contain illegal content and Nikki withheld them from the list on his website. Nikki has instead reported actual child porn websites to the police himself - only to find them still online a year later as they turned up on the police's blacklist. Nikki has also analysed child porn distribution mechanisms and suggested methods for attacking the phenomenon, but these have fallen on deaf ears. Chasing criminals in "inaccessible" countries such as USA, UK and continental Europe might entail real work - it seems easier to just sweep the criminal activity under a carpet.

The Administrative Court held that Nikki had to pay his own legal fees, because "since the law is unclear, inclusion of his website on the blacklist cannot be seen to have resulted from an error by the authorities". This sends a message that complaining about actions of authorities, even if they acted against the law, will be expensive for a citizen.

Nikki is again considering an appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court. At the same time, IFPI Finland has started a court process to block The Pirate Bay at ISP level, which would - if successful - create a new category of blocked sites.

The court ruling (only in Finnish)
http://effi.org/e/lapsiporno.info-hao-2011.pdf

HS.fi: IFPI Finland orders Elisa internet service provider to prevent its clients from accessing Pirate Bay website
http://www.hs.fi/english/article/IFPI+Finland+orders+Elisa+internet+se...

IFPI Press Release (only in Finnish)
http://antipiracy.fi/ajankohtaista/217/suomalaiset-musiikkituottajat-h...

EDRi-gram: Finland: Complaints not allowed for the Police child-porn censorship list
http://www.edri.org/edri-gram/number7.12/lapsiporno-trial-finland

EDRi-gram: ENDitorial: Finnish web censorship
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number6.4/finland-web-censorship

(Contribution by Timo Karjalainen- EDRi-member Electronic Frontier Finland (Effi))