The Icelandic initiative for pornography censorship

Abstract

This paper outlines the Icelandic legal framework regarding pornography and the recent public debate about what constitutes pornography, censorship, and the role of the state in enforcing national legislation on the internet – a transnational medium. Iceland, an island of 300,000 people, has become synonymous with ambitious freedom of expression initiatives. International commentators were thus taken by surprise when the Minister of the Interior announced his intentions to extend existing laws to regulate pornography within Iceland's borders, sparking a heated debate characterized by conflicting understandings of the character of and necessity for censorship.

Keywords:

• Iceland
• pornography censorship
• Icelandic laws
• internet censorship

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Erratum

Notes

1. This does, of course, raise the question of why Iceland has been regarded as a beacon of freedom of expression. One explanation might be that pornography had not been considered as ‘expression’. Another is that Article 210 – the article that addresses pornography directly – was simply overlooked in the process of reforming laws regarding freedom of expression.

2. ‘Af hálfu sérfræðinganefndar Menningastofnunar Sameinuðu þjóðanna var í mars 1986 gerður greinarmunur á hugtökunum klám (pornografia) og kynþokkalist (erotika), þannig að klám var skilgreint sem ögrandi framsetning á kynlífi í auðgunartilgangi, án ástar,blíðu eða ábyrgðar, en kynþokkalist sem bókmenntaleg eða listræn tjáning ástar’.

3. ‘Miðað við framboð hér á landi á efni af kynferðislegum toga hljóta þetta að teljast til tölulega fá mál sem leiða til málshöfðunar’.

4. Gail Dines homepage (accessed October 16, 2013): http://www.wheelock.edu/academics/faculty-and-administration/dines-gail

5. ‘Í annan stað hef ég, að tillögu undirbúnignshópsins, lagt til að skipaður verði starfshópur sem kortleggur úrræði lögreglu til að framfylgja banni við klámi, einkum með hliðsjón af aðgengi barna að gófu og skaðlegu efni. Sá hópur mun fjalla um hvað er tæknilega mögulegt og hvað ekki og skila sínum tillögum, sem unnt verður að byggja frekar pólitíska stefnumótun’.

6. ‘All circumvention tools use the same basic method to bypass this sort of network filtering: they proxy connections through third party sites that are not filtered themselves’ (Roberts et al. 2010, 3).

7. ‘VPN services use virtual private network software to encrypt and tunnel all Internet traffic through a proxy machine’ (Roberts et al. 2010, 8).

8. TOR is a so-called ‘onion network’ based on the concept of encrypted information going through at least three computers of proxies before it is decrypted for the user. Its main goal is to provide anonymity for the user.