Irate Aussies go after US website

The owner of a US website accused of breaking Australian law by the Australian Human Rights Commission has told them to rack right off.

Encyclopaedia Dramatica is a tasteless collection of articles along the lines of Sickipedia or Something Awful.

ED is refusing to bow to demands from the AHRC that it remove an article about aborigines.

The AHRC letter accuses the site's largest shareholder, Joseph Evers, of breaching the Australian Racial Discrimination Act. It said it had received 20 complaints about the website.

The AHRC insists that the site should follow Australian law because, although the site is hosted in the US, with free speech protection, articles which can be read and downloaded in Australia are considered to have been published in Australia.

Evers insisted in his blog that the site would never bow to censorship and that Aussie users would be able to see the site "up until the point that your God-forsaken government blocks it with their soon-to-be-implemented secret list of banned material".

The site was blacklisted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority during the trial of the country's censoring firewall.

The article on aborigines was also removed from Google's Australian search results earlier this year. As Joseph Evers put it in his blog: "This was right after Google had done a large amount of grandstanding about fighting Chinese censorship. Which proves they’re a bunch of spineless hypocrites."

One of the site's moderators gave a rather brilliant interview to Nine News which includes a quote from Matthew 15.11 - "Not that which goeth into the mouth defileth a man; but that which cometh out of the mouth, this defileth a man." Wise words indeed.

Evers has been advised by his lawyer to steer clear of Australia. ®