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Macedonia tastes the fruit of censorhip (again in 3 days)

Submitted by Новица on

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Ribaro, a prominent Macedonian (video) blogger, reports that his newest video was taken down by Youtube after a copyright claim made by another user. The video is a commentary supporting the student protests in Macedonia made days after the second protest on 10.12.2014.

Ribaro's videos are parody, mostly on important current events in the country, and our copyright law allows for use of any work in a parody without special permission from the author. I think the same goes for the US law (assuming that Youtube uses US law as basis for decisions).

The video is, of course, available elsewhere: vimeo link; other youtube link.

This a second case of censorship related to the biggest student protest in Macedonia that aims at preserving autonomy of universities.

Macedonia tastes the fruit of censorhip (again)

Submitted by Новица on

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The second student protest against external tests which would terminate the autonomy of universities in Macedonia was held today in Skopje form 12 to 15 hours local time.

Sometime around 12:30 the major mobile network in Macedonia - T-mobile went down. Many people reported problems with the other mobile networks too. I didn't have access to service for almost 3 hours. The outage was city-wide.

T-mobile said in a statement that they had a short disruption of services due to technical difficulties. Their statement is - at least - questionable.

Whatever the true reason for lack of service, the fact is that all of the mobile operators had problems during the protest and service was swiftly restored sometime after 15 hours local time.

It is difficult to imagine a "technical difficulty" that would disable three networks at the same time and for the same period of hours. Therefore it is reasonable to assume that the denial of service was planned to ensure that no live information was published on-line so that the media can be controlled to the extent that is possible.

This is what censorship looks like.