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Censorship or Manual Filtering?

Littleman tipped us off to a post on Travoli's blog pointing out that Google is filtering content in the US, but it looks like Google changed some wording around.

The original quote was:

News stories have reported Google’s decision to censor content within China. But is Google also censoring content in the USA? Searching for "big boom" on Google’s own video search service returns a listing for this video of an IED explosion.

Instead of a video playing, a message appears, stating:

"This video is not playable in your country."

That error code was what people got in the US. The content is available in countries like Canada.

Google changed the error code to "We're sorry, but the provider of this video, not Google, has chosen to disable playback in your location."

Amazing what a difference a few words make, eh. Will many content producers create content and block the US?

- Y! MyWeb

This has been debunked

Please see:
http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/21/google_censoring_ira.html

Key Except from BoingBoing:

Google is not censoring these videos. A spokesperson at Google tells Boing Boing:

"Video uploaders, using Google Video's 'Advanced Options' feature, can choose to blacklist countries. In this case the uploader blacklisted the US and only the US. When uploading the video the content owner set a preference not to show this content to users in the US."

Further investigation by BB confirmed that this was the case -- the person who uploaded this video, not Google, chose to block US viewers.

By SFSeo at Feb 22 2006 - 20:22

Happens in Canada

Happens in Canada all the time. Just like I can't go to NBC and watch Olympic video from here.

By Shoda at Feb 22 2006 - 20:45

why?

Why on earth would someone want or need to block out a whole country from seeing a video? What is the purpose of that feature?

By DarkMatter at Feb 22 2006 - 21:51

rights

You typically negotiate rights for some region, eg. a country. That can be full rights, or partial rights, eg. some rights for a format, some other rights for the music used, etc.

It's a bitch. And just when we thought we finally had the worldwideweb and fat pipes and everybody could watch the same video footage as everyone else... sheesh.

By claus at Feb 22 2006 - 21:54