PKBlogs: breaking censorship or stealing content?

Blogs represent a real challenge to oppressive regimes around the world, so it’s no surprise that stories of blanket bans are common. Pakistan’s is just one of a number of censors to apparently block anything served under the blogspot.com domain. Blocking Blogger’s free hosting service in this way takes out thousands, perhaps millions, of blogs.

But no longer thanks to apparent good guys PKBlogs. PKBlogs takes content from Blogspot and redisplays it under its own domain name. This can only ever be a temporary fix as the censors will be able to block the PKBlogs domain just as easily as they blocked Blogspot and it’s only a matter of time before they wake up.

And not everybody’s happy. Manchester’s What happened last night? is just one blog that wants out. Their content, as filtered by PKBlogs, is just as visible to Manchester web users as it is Pakistanis and search engines occasionally direct UK users to the PKBlogs filtered site.

As a Manchester what’s on guide, Pakistan isn’t a market this site’s bothered about and they’re upset because advertising revenue isn’t getting through the filter. They claim that Google Ad code is altered so that advertising revenue goes to PKBlogs instead of the original blogger. (Although, when I visited the Google Ads had been replaced with white space and PKBlogs had added an advertisement to the bottom of the page.) It’s not at all clear where this income, which may be considerable, is going.

It seems that in the excitement of breaking the censor, PKBlogs has forgotten that many bloggers earn an income from their writing that they won’t happily sacrifice to fund this campaign. In any case they should be entitled to know where the money their blogs earn is going and to opt out of the project should they wish.

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