The Doha Centre for Media Freedom, a Qatar-based non-governmental organisation, on Sunday called on the popular internet search engine company Google to reject a request from Dubai Police to ban approximately 500 terms.

A representative from Dubai Police confirmed the request for a ban. The list of key words included pornographic and anti-religious terms and was discussed in conjunction with the widely reported request for a similar ban on items on the user-generated video site YouTube, according to police media executive Ashur Musa.

Dr. Mohammad Mourad, the director of decision making at Dubai Police, said the list, originally compiled by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority, has not been finalised. Dubai Police will meet with representatives from YouTube, owned by Google, in two weeks to discuss the potential YouTube ban.

While the list of search terms has not yet been implemented, Mourad described the representatives from Google as “very cooperative.” Google could not be reached for comment.

Google has agreed to government requests for internet monitoring before, most notably in China. As a precondition for tapping into the country’s market, the company agreed to scrub certain websites from search results, essentially presenting users with a sanitized version of the internet.

While the UAE authorities have said that the potentially banned terms are related to security and pornography topics, the Doha Centre was unable to obtain a copy of the list from either the police or Google.

According to the Doha Centre, the UAE authorities said they sought to “maintain religious harmony and prevent any infringements of religious and ethnic integrity in the light of local culture and traditions”.

Xavier Rinaldi, a journalist at the centre, said the strategy will prove ineffective in the long run. “If you don’t have choice, you don’t have harmony. You create, you maintain and you perpetuate frustration. Blocking or censoring leads to frustration.”…SOURCE

Yet another stupid decision.  If the Etisalat and DU software isn’t powerful enough to detect the nude photos on Flickr, they should take the ban off  completely.

Photographers can no longer share their photos with the country’s online community after telecommunications provider Du blocked the web site on Monday.

Etisalat has blocked the web site since 2006 because of nude images, but up until Monday, it could still be accessed through rival provider, Emirates Integrated Telecommunications Company, popularly known as Du.

The move will mean that dozens of photographers who had used the site to display their work will be denied access altogether.

One photographer, Catalin Marin, said he had access to Flickr since he lived in Nakheel-owned properties which used Du as a service provider.

“I’ve been able to sell some of my work through Flickr to magazines around the world,” he said. “It’s a massive bummer that they chosen to do this.

“There are some images on the site which use nudity for art, but this shouldn’t mean that the whole site should be blocked.”

Guidelines for the censorship of the web are set by the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA). Content which promotes pornography, gambling and drugs, or those which defame religion, are blocked under guidelines set by the TRA… http://khaleejtimes.com/DisplayArticle08.asp?xfile=/data/theuae/2009/March/theuae_March450.xml&section=theuae

The National Media Council has dismissed an English author’s claims that her book has been banned in the UAE, after her allegations left a literary festival embroiled in controversy this week.

Geraldine Bedell claimed that her novel, The Gulf Between Us, had been banned from sale because it features a homosexual character. Her publisher, Penguin, repeated the claim.

The charges prompted the Canadian novelist Margaret Atwood, a Booker Prize winner, to boycott the International Festival of Literature in Dubai that she was due to attend and at which Ms Bedell’s book was to be launched. Others among the 60-plus authors scheduled to attend the International Festival of Literature next week have contemplated following suit or have written letters of protest.

But Ibrahim al Abed, director-general of the media council, said the book had not been banned and was highly unlikely to be.

“It’s not our policy to ban any book unless it’s crude pornography or it’s contemptuous of religion — whether it’s Islam or any religion,” he said. “Our country is known to be open. More than 70 per cent of the population are non-Emiratis. They’re living freely and openly.”

The festival organiser, Isobel Abulhoul, said Ms Bedell had been informed in September of the decision not to feature her book in the festival.

“We are very disappointed and a little surprised that it has taken so long for anyone to reconsider their position,” she said in a statement, particularly as it “has come to the public’s attention only now and around the publication of her novel”.

She added: “We have tried to contact Ms Atwood asking her to reconsider as we would like to speak directly with her to share the full picture.”…MORE