[liberationtech] Coursera to join censor club by blocking Iran IP space

[Collin Anderson]

For what it is worth, I have an appreciation for the manner that Coursera
proceeded with this, being that they have been open about the process that
led to the restriction, that they are apparently reaching out to bloggers,
and since they seem to be pursuing a legal remedy. That is far better than
some companies, whose new product launches are followed by a need to check
if its even available in sanctioned countries or who still won't take
action even when their product was specifically named in a Treasury
Department document (I hate you Adobe). On top of that, their announcement
essentially instructs the public to use a VPN and to not give them reason
to know about location -- that's imperfect yes, but it was respectful.


On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 8:26 AM, Collin Anderson
<collin at averysmallbird.com>wrote:

> My hypothesis has been that Coursera, in the midst of raising venture
> capital funds, had a broad compliance risk evaluation and this was raised
> by outside counsel. Based on their blogpost, I suspect they
> took voluntary action and then reached out to State (or vice versa), who
> likely informed them of the Syrian General License and are probably working
> on specific licenses for other countries (this will take months in the best
> case). While no one would ever likely go after Coursera for continuing the
> way things were, no one would ever advise them to ignore legal concerns
> either. Myself and others read into the Iranian and Sudanese exemptions as
> liberally as we can, and it was clear that this was an unfortunately
> reasonable interpretation. The law simply has not anticipated the rise of
> virtual, for-profit, non-accredited, non-degree-granting educational
> institutions; as such, it falls outside of General Licenses 1 (Sudan) and E
> (Iran). Hopefully, what will come out of this mess is a new General
> License, which was the reaction to problems on sport exchanges with Iranian
> officials last summer, since MITx has been pulling similar moves lately as
> well.
>
>
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 8:10 AM, Rich Kulawiec <rsk at gsp.org> wrote:
>
>> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 12:17:00PM +0000, Amin Sabeti wrote:
>> > The main point is Coursera has done something that it's not legitimate.
>>
>> They were (apparently) forced to do this.  It's not like Coursera
>> staff woke up one day and suddenly decided to block those countries
>> because they had nothing better to do.  Please read:
>>
>>
>> http://hummusforthought.com/2014/01/29/us-bans-students-from-blacklisted-countries-from-getting-a-free-education/
>>
>> ---rsk
>> --
>> Liberationtech is public & archives are searchable on Google. Violations
>> of list guidelines will get you moderated:
>> https://mailman.stanford.edu/mailman/listinfo/liberationtech.
>> Unsubscribe, change to digest, or change password by emailing moderator at
>> companys at stanford.edu.
>>
>
>
>
> --
> *Collin David Anderson*
> averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
>



-- 
*Collin David Anderson*
averysmallbird.com | @cda | Washington, D.C.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://mailman.stanford.edu/pipermail/liberationtech/attachments/20140130/a7623497/attachment.html>