The bavarian KJM (Kommission für Jugendschutz = Commission for the Protection of Young Persons) requested the BPjM (Bundesprüfstelle für jugendgefährdende Medien = Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons) to ban every Austrian online game store (like Gameware.at). From the internet. Somehow.
That means they want to stop people from buying banned games from Austria. The thing is, if a game gets banned in Germany you can still get it totally legal in Austria. Which a lot of people do, which bugs the people who want the “sick filth” gone.
The reasoning for the request is that they want to protect the youth from “social-ethical disorientation”, “brutalisation of young adults” and “lasting empathy loss”. So not only do they absolutely fail to understand the internet, they are using the same bogus arguments that they have always used in the past.
At this moment it is not clear if the BPjM is able to ban the sites in question, since they don’t fall under German but under Austrian jurisdiction.
All this makes me really sad. Sad and very angry. It’s one of the first steps toward China-like censorship of the internet in Germany. Everything that doesn’t fit the opinion of the government is going to get blocked out. Two years ago, predicting something like this would have got people laughing at you. But now, shit just got motherfucking real.
Coincidentally, a law that allows the government to basically censor the internet (using the killer argument of child pornography) got passed in the German Bundestag (Parliament) earlier today. Not only is it a giant cut in our rights as citizens and non-effective at preventing anyone from molesting a child, it’s practically the end of the division of power. The BKA (German FBI) can just add anyone to the list without real control by anyone. And since everyone that knows what he is doing can work around the blocks in 30 seconds, it doesn’t even make sense. The whole law is just there to make some politicians look good for the elections. And to install an instrument to censor the internet.
But what has that to do with gaming? In the last few days members of the CDU, which is sort of like the German version of the republicans, have been commenting about using the internet locking on more things then just child pornography. Like violent videogames…
I give them 6 months before they block filesharing sites, non governmental regulated gambling, Wikileaks, government critical news sites. At some point every Website that mentions games that are banned in Germany will be locked out. So, if you don’t hear from me on this site anymore, you know what happened.
We are looking ahead at some fucked up times in good old Germany. And every last one of the fat cats that waved that law through should know that they just lost the votes of a whole generation.
Via: Gamers.at
We’re seriously fucked over here. I fear that the blockade will be expanded before the elections, after all child porn and violent videogames are really great election campaign topics…
It’ll all turn out ok, by the next election we (the UK) will be run by the BNP so every millitary resource will be used to ensure every other country doesn’t exist anymore.
Wow that is a really horrible situation. You guys should be out on the street protesting. Is there like a pro-gaming campaign in Germany I can donate money to? This is definitely a cause I can get behind.
Well we have a rather big movement against the whole bullshit the government is pulling at the moment. This WILL lead to a lot of protests and hopefully long overdue political change.
If you want to help, donate some money to the german pirate party.
@Joshingo:
There is a nationwide demonstration tomorrow (all infos here )
I’ll be at the one in berlin but I don’t think it’ll be too crowded since students are pretty busy striking and demonstrating against the new education plans…
Unfortunately a lot of the people are either not willing to stand up for their rights or simply didn’t understand what is happening at the moment. People in our country are a bit lazy when it comes to protest against something, even if that restricts their civil rights simply because they think “We won’t be able to do anything against it” or are simply not willing to protest for a longer period of time. We could learn quite something from our french neighbours about that, I can tell you that. :(
On the other side, our goverment is not interested in the votes of young people (because older conservative voters are the majority in here and the amount of them keeps increasing). We even had a petition against the website cencorship – it reached way over 134.000 signatures and got in the Bundestag but had no effect after all. Our goverment simply keeps ignoring the young people and caters to the old ones who didn’t grew up with the internet and stick to newspapers and TV – therefor they don’t see our protest because most of it takes place online.
We have to take the protest to the streets, we have to be vocal and god damn loud in order to make our voices heard.
The only way to prevent this law, would be the Civil Council (Bundesrat) because it still has to give it’s ok in order to turn that bill into actual law.