Ok, I’m being deliberately sensational here, but this is too good to be true. In an attempt to protect management institute IIPM from criticism, the government has ordered blocking of 70 websites critical of IIPM. The list includes a notification on UGC’s site that IIPM is not a university and does not have the power to grant degrees. Details at Medianama and LiveMint (via Shivam Vij on facebook). Apparently this was ordered by a court in Gwalior.
IIPM head Arindam Chaudhuri may not be above the law, but apparently our lower courts deem him above the UGC.
Meanwhile, feel free to read this article by Shivam, reposted after the original link was blocked.
Despite the order, Abi reports that some sites remain accessible. Unfortunately his own previous posts are blocked, at least by Airtel in Chennai. Or maybe the government just decided to unblock the most ridiculous examples like the UGC one — but if they can defy the court on that, surely they can defy it for the rest too?
Unrelatedly, Abi finds that his posts on the Anil Potti (Duke) scientific fraud case have been taken down by Google. This seems to be in response to a DMCA complaint — the DMCA being one of the more chilling acts of legislation in recent US history. Again, he’s not alone. If a law strong-armed through the US congress by big media companies in the 1990s to (allegedly) protect their content can now be used to squelch commentary on scientific fraud, we live in interesting times.
gaddeswarup
/ February 17, 2013Thanks; I was not aware of DMCA. Gooling I found that there is also an automated DMCA counter-notice generator mentioned in
http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/02/site-plagiarizes-blog-posts-then-files-dmca-takedown-on-originals/