Internet Watch Foundation and Wikipedia
On 5 December 2008, the Internet Watch Foundation (IWF), a British watchdog group, blacklisted content on the English Wikipedia related to Scorpions' 1976 studio album Virgin Killer, due to the presence of its controversial cover artwork, depicting a young girl posing nude, with a faux shattered-glass effect obscuring her genitalia.
This began when BT Group introduced Cleanfeed, a server-side filtering system which uses data obtained from the Internet Watch Foundation.
The IWF is a Quango organisation that operates a website where users can report web pages containing illegal or dubious content to be added to their blacklists.
[13] This was implemented in order to prevent users from accessing this material, since it is illegal to possess an indecent image of a child under the age of 18 per the Protection of Children Act.
[15][16] On 5 December 2008 the Internet Watch Foundation added the Wikipedia URLs for the Virgin Killer article and the description page of the image to its blacklist.
[17] After the blacklisting, users of major UK ISPs, including BT, Vodafone, Virgin Media/Tesco.net, Be/O2, EasyNet/UK Online/Sky Broadband, Orange, Demon, and TalkTalk (Opal Telecom), were unable to access the content.
Internet security expert Richard Clayton explained that "We see this borderline stuff all the time; it's a no-win", before adding that the decision seems to have been based on taking the image out of context, particularly "given that you can go into HMV and buy a copy on the high street".
[21] On 9 December 2008 the IWF reversed its blacklist of the Wikipedia pages on the basis of the "contextual issues involved in this specific case and, in light of the length of time the image has existed and its wide availability".
Due to erroneous use of Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) and other routing technology to redirect the connections to the filtering proxies, users of some networks were temporarily prevented from accessing or editing any content hosted by Wikimedia, a problem reminiscent of Pakistan's accidental blocking of YouTube for much of the world instead of only their own citizens.
[27] On 9 December 2008, Jimmy Wales, co-founder of Wikipedia, who then held the "community founder seat" on the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, told the UK's Channel 4 News that he had briefly considered legal action.
[39] In an impact study preparing a bill dealing with cybercrime, the Cabinet of France listed the Virgin Killer block as an example of indiscriminate filtering.
