British Library Network Blocks ‘Hamlet’ For ‘Violent Content’ http://www.davidicke.com/headlines/88923-british-library-network-blocks-hamlet-for-violent-content 'The use of Web blocks — usually “for the children” — is becoming depressingly common these days. So much so, that many people have probably come to accept them as a fact of online life. After all, the logic presumably goes, we can’t do much about it, and anyway surely it’s a good thing to try to filter out the bad stuff? Techdirt readers, of course, know otherwise, but for anyone who still thinks that well-intentioned blocking of “unsuitable” material is unproblematic, the following cautionary tale from the British blogger W.H. Forsyth may prove instructive: On Monday, I was sitting in the British Library frantically trying to write my new book in a shturmovshchina. I had to quickly check a particular line in Hamlet, so I Googled Hamlet MIT, because the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has put the entire works of Shakespeare up on the Internet. (It takes 70 mins to order a physical book). I clicked on the link and… A message came up from the British Library telling me that access to site was blocked due to “violent content”.' Read more: British Library Network Blocks ‘Hamlet’ For ‘Violent Content’ Sent by gReader