EDITORIAL - Sex video and cyber freedom

There seems to be a clamor, both in the public and private sectors, to clamp down on the spread of that sex video that has gotten a female Catholic university student and her school into a great deal of embarrassment.

While that seems to be the proper course of action to take, certain inconsistencies beg to be noticed. For one, wasn’t the cyberworld up in arms only very recently (in fact it still is) amid efforts by government to clamp down on certain liberties?

When government passed the cybercrimes law, making certain acts committed in cyberspace punishable, netizens came close to waging a revolution in protest, insisting that their right to do almost anything in cyberspace cannot be curtailed.

And yet here is this unique partnership of both public and private sectors calling for precisely the curtailment of one particular cyberspace activity — uploading and sharing of sex videos.

Before anyone gets any crazy ideas, this is not in defense of nor serves to promote such uploading and sharing of sex videos. But the inconsistencies are just to tempting and palpable to be ignored and passed over.

If netizens believe no law should be passed that would in anyway curtail their right to free expression, why cannot somebody pass on a video as an expression of whatever it is that drove him to pass the video in the first place.

If right of expression is absolute and is to come under no restraint or regulation, who is to prevent, or why should anyone be prevented from sharing a sexual opinion best expressed in a video of explicit sex?

For every taboo there is permissiveness, and those involved in the making of the video clearly made up their choice, and no amount of pleading for privacy can curtail a right the world has not seen so aggressively pushed for itself as cyber freedom.

If some netizens feel no compunction nor restraint in going to the extent of hacking certain sensitive sites just to prove the point that they cannot be curtailed, what is a small sex video whose participants in the making threw all caution to the wind in the first place.