China

Ars Technica reports that the International Olympic Committee has lifted its ban on blogging. Athletes competing in Beijing 2008 will be allowed to blog about the Olympics, so long as they follow some, well, restrictive guidelines. Most notably, athletes will not be permitted to report on the overall competition or relay information from third parties; instead, the guidelines require that they focus on their own personal experiences. This is because, in the IOC's view, blogging is "a legitimate form of personal expression and not a form of journalism." Whew, I'm glad they resolved that tricky ontological question.

Additionally, athlete bloggers may not post any photographs of the sporting events (although they may post their own photos from inside and outside official Olympic areas), and their posts must be "dignified and in good taste." They also may not host any advertisements or create an affiliation with a specific company (fair enough). It's easy to make fun of all these restrictions, but it is a step forward, and it may make for some fascinating material, even within the guidelines.

Or will it? As if all these rules weren't enough, recall that the Chinese government also filters the Internet in a serious way. According to Ars,   read more »

This is terrible news. CNN and TechCrunch reported Friday that city officials in central China beat a man to death for attempting to record a protest on his mobile phone. Apparently, there was some sort of confrontation between villagers in the central Chinese province of Hubei and local municipal "inspectors" over the dumping of waste near the villagers' homes. When Wei Wenhua, a 41-year-old construction company executive, tried to film the altercation with his camera phone, a group of more than 50 of the inspectors attacked him, beating him for five minutes, according to China's Xinhua news agency. Government investigators later recovered Wei's mobile phone, but the video had been deleted.

It is not entirely clear whether Wei's filming was a spontaneous act of citizen journalism by a complete amateur, or whether he was a blogger trying to cover the story. The headlines on CNN and TechCrunch both refer to Wei as a blogger, but neither article gives any details on his blogging activity, and the CNN articles says that he "happened on [the] confrontation."

Reporters Without Borders issued a statement about the incident:   read more »

Reporters Without Borders is reporting that a Chinese court in the southeastern province of Zhejiang sentenced lawyer and cyber-dissident Chen Shuqing to four years imprisonment for posting articles critical of the government on the Internet:

According to a recent article in Ars Technica, the Chinese government withdrew a proposal to require all bloggers in China to register their real identities.

While China has been the subject of some excellent studies concerning the government's use of technical measures to control access to information, including a recent report by the Open Net Initiative, there hasn't been a great deal of focus on the use of law to limit and censor citizen media within China and other countries that actively filter information.  If you are aware of countries that have, or are considering, registration requirements for bloggers or other citizen media, please let us know.

In addition, I've been receiving a lot of interest from people within and outside China to include Chinese law in our legal guide and other resources.  We will be adding that material to the site as soon as we can.

(Disclosure: The Open Net Initiative, like the CMLP, is a joint project of the Berkman Center.)