Today I received a registered letter from the BPjM, Bundesprüfstelle
für jugendgefährdende Medien. It's a complaint about one page of the
ASH mirror web site that I have been hosting for a few years
already. The page is a German translation of the 'Suicide Methods
File', http://ash.spaink.net/methodsxlations/deutsche.html

Apparently, the BPjM has to power to make search engines drop a page
from their listing. Some information about their work can be found
in EDRIgram, March 10 2005:
http://www.edri.org/edrigram/number3.5/search

It's a bit unclear on what grounds they complain. In a general
English explanation they claim 'In your case, a German youth welfare
institution has requested the aforementioned object to be entered
into the "index" because of pornographic/ indecent/extremeley
violent/racisr/anti-Semitic content.' The page is of course neither;
it is a rather factual description of the effectiveness of various
suicide methods.

I'm not yet sure what the effects of the complaint are; my German
sucks. Will they 'merely' make search engines stop indexing this
page? Will search engines be asked not to index _any_ of my web pages?

I'm also not sure of the grounds for this BPjM complaint. In as far
as I gathered, _only_ pornographic material should be protected by
an age-verification system. Does this mean that porn can be on the
net (on condition that it is age protected), but that all other
material can only be published on the net if deemed acceptable for
minors?

According to the complaint, I have two weeks to reply. I will
probably send a formal objection in Dutch, saying that I have no
clue what they are asking me to do or not do.


- K -