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A U.S. judge has dismissed a lawsuit that sought to punish Chinese Internet company Baidu for blocking pro-democracy works on its search engine, with one legal expert stating that the case was more of a publicity stunt than an actual legal challenge to Chinas online censorship.

It is well known that China regularly censors anti-government content on the Internet, with local companies such as Baidu required to comply. But the U.S. lawsuit, filed two years ago by eight pro-democracy activists, claimed that both the company and the Chinese government had violated New Yorks free speech laws. This was because Baidus censorship extended to users accessing the site from New York, the lawsuit argued.

On Monday, however, Baidu won dismissal of the case after Judge Jesse Furman of U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York said that the company had not been properly served the court document papers. China, invoking an international treaty, refused to comply with serving the court papers, stating that it would infringe its sovereignty or security.

The lawsuits plaintiffs have 30 days to propose another way to serve the court papers to Baidu. Attorneys for the plaintiffs could not immediately be reached for comment. The lawsuit had originally demanded Baidu pay US$16 million in damages for censoring pro-democracy works from the eight activists.

Although the lawsuit had initially grabbed the media spotlight when it was first filed, the case had little chance of holding up in court, said Stan Abrams, a legal expert in China. Baidu is a private foreign company, and has no legal duty to serve users in New York, he added. Instead, the plaintiffs were likely hoping the lawsuit would draw attention to their pro-democracy cause.

Did they succeed in that or not? I guess were talking about it, so to that extent they did. But I dont see this as headline news, Abrams said. Its hard to keep people paying attention because you knew this case was going to lose.

Michael Kan covers IT, telecom and Internet in China for the IDG News Service. More by Michael Kan, IDG News Service

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US censorship lawsuit against China's Baidu dismissed

26 March 2013 Last updated at 20:23 ET

You have written something politically sensitive on one of China's "weibo" microblogging sites. So how much time passes before it gets deleted? And what does it reveal about how Chinese censors work? Computer scientists Jed Crandall and Dan Wallach explain the findings of a study they conducted.

In China, internet penetration has grown massively in the last decade - from 4.6% in 2002 to 42.1% in 2012.

Microblogging site Sina Weibo only launched in 2010, but it now has 300 million users and about 100 million messages are sent daily. It clearly plays an important role in the discourse surrounding current events in China.

The Chinese government seems to require Chinese companies to maintain internal censorship regimes.

There have been several interesting studies on how Chinese censorship works and how to work around it, but we wanted to know how the censors do it and how they make their censorship scale to manage hundreds of millions of users.

We found a landscape in which a post could be deleted as quickly as five minutes after being put online and where the censors appear not to work a regular day, but seem to take a break when China's all-important 19:00 news comes on.

So how did we make such observations?

Last year - along with several colleagues - we spent 30 days observing 3,500 users on Sina Weibo to track the fate of their posts. During this time around 300 of the accounts were deleted - that's about 12% of the total. We further examined data about the posts and that provided some fascinating insights into how the censors go about their job.

We looked at users who have been censored and then see how long their to-be-censored posts survived. Those who are more often censored are also censored faster which shows they are getting more scrutiny than other users.

Read more:
The astonishing speed of Chinese censorship

ymca gym censorship workout no sun wed 20 mar 2013 George Godley Soho London U.K 00401
http://georgegodley.com/ http://www.youtube.com/geogodley https://twitter.com/geogodley https://www.facebook.com/pages/GeoGodley/213431738712281.

By: georgegodley

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ymca gym censorship workout no sun wed 20 mar 2013 George Godley Soho London U.K 00401 - Video

Post last. Welby meats Harrington. The video has finally emerged after severe censorship
via YouTube Capture.

By: Alana Harris

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Post last. Welby meats Harrington. The video has finally emerged after severe censorship - Video

A post at Anonnews.org, a website associated with hacktivist movement Anonymous, has called for a new 'Op', this time calling on Facebook users to protest against the social networking giants alleged censorship.

The group has called for a protest on 6 April, which the posting notes was the same date that Mahatma Gandhi defied the British to lead the Dandi Salt March in 1930 and when Egyptian activists planned a strike against the Egyptian government in 2008.

All anons worldwide hit Facebook with uncensored material. We shall continue this bombardment of material as long as we can - hopefully 24 hours, the call to action stated.

We will flood their system - their admins wont be able to keep up. They cant ban us all at once!

Some Facebook users have said they have been unfairly censored by the social network.

The Jeu de Paume museum was recently blocked from using Facebook for 24 hours after it posted a nude photograph of a woman as part of an exhibition on the French photographer Laure Albin Guillot. The photograph is still on Facebook but has been censored so that nudity is hidden from viewers.

The museum wrote on its Facebook page that it will no longer post nude photographs even if we believe that their artistic value is high, and that there is nothing pornographic about these photographs, which are in accordance with the right to publish contents of a personal nature.

Facebook says in its community standards that it respects peoples right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo's David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.

Another Facebook user who was allegedly recently censored after he posted a public document from Missouri Courts in the United States was blocked for using the site for seven days.

Isnt that nice of Facebook to block you from posting content, for merely sharing public information from Missouri Courts, the user said in a YouTube video.

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Anonymous to protest against Facebook censorship