online

     blasphemy on the net

As with defamation, blasphemous expression online poses several challenges.

The first is simply that the net offers a new mechanism for the communication of expression.

A corollary is that many people consider that online necessarily equals free, with offensive text, audio, video and graphics somehow being situated outside any law. Action by Italian police, noted later in this profile, to summarily take down web pages that they considered breached Italian law, is a reminder that the net is bounded

A third challenge is that the net offers access by a global audience: "everyone has an opportunity to be horrified or bored". In the past exposure to offensive content has generally been localised and restriction (when it occurred) had a local basis.

Access to content via the global information infrastructure allows audiences in different locations to be offended, with potential conflicts about whether a legal offence has occurred and which jurisdiction has responsibility. Those conflicts are not merely 'north-south': the European Union for example faces difficulties as Greek authorities prosecute German and other satirists who have offended Greek religious sensibilities.

More broadly the internet enables access to content across borders and thereby fuels extra-legal action such as boycotts, death threats and violence across the Middle East in response to satirical cartoons in a Danish newspaper. In the past few people in Jeddah would have seen such cartoons, few Western audiences and publishers outside Denmark would have accessed the cartoons and been able to quickly republish them in responding to an "Islamic assault on free speech".

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