It's possible that "censorship" denotatively means suppression of any speech (including the parade of horribles -- viagra spam, stolen IDs, abuse content, etc.) and connotatively means suppression of speech with at least some political valence. Or alternatively that it's denotatively ambiguous and has multiple connotations.

A case that sort of rubs up against this in the U.S. -- I use an American example because in Canada s.1 circumscribes all legal rights, including freedom of expression, so it would be academic whether this raised speech concerns or not -- is Morse v. Frederick.

In this case, a student, Frederick, raised a banner that read "Bong Hits 4 Jesus" in front of some television cameras. The behaviour occurred off school grounds but nearby, and during an event that students were allowed to leave school early to attend. The school suspended Frederick because his banner promoted drug use.

A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was. One argument is that it was essentially dadaist, absurdist speech (Frederick's claim. Another argument is that it was promoting criminal behaviour (the school principal's claim; Roberts, Scalia, Kennedy, Thomas, and Alito in the opinion). Another argument is that it was political speech, aimed at contesting a public policy (Stevens, Souter, Ginsberg in dissent; Alito and Kennedy in concurrence)

Although there were other issues in the case, namely to do with how speech is regulated within schools and whether this constituted a school event, one of the undercurrents is that constitutional protections for political speech seem to be more crucial to many of the justices than constitutional protections for gibberish speech.

So I don't think it's crazy to suggest, at a minimum, that there exists a well-support denotative use of "censorship" that specifically refers to speech with political characteristics, rather than all speech. Through that lens, copyright enforcement could either be censorship (to the extent that the enforcement is designed or has the effect of prohibiting the dissemination of political speech or prohibits commentary on a public policy) or not (to the extent the content being restricted is fundamentally apolitical). And this is true even if there are other denotations that consider stopping any speech to be censorship.

> A lot of the ruling relied on parsing what category of speech this banner was.

But that's not germane, because “censorship” is not restricted to “restrictions on speech that violate the First Amendment”, so the US Supreme Court “parsing about which category of speech” something is has no bearing on the meaning of “censorship.” In fact, consideration of what category speech is only matters in the First Amendment context after one has determined that censorship (and, particularly, government censorship) is occurring. Only then is it important to parse the details of which set of standards to apply to determine if the government censorship involved is Constitutionally prohibited.

Edit: all the legal references are in a US context

Censorship is prohibiting speech or blocking a speaker because of the content or alleged content of their speech.

Not all censorship is unconstitutional. The legal blocking of curse words amd nudity on broadcast TV is clearly censorship regardless of if the intent or effect of cursing while nude on TV is political.

It is true that free speech protections against the censorship of political speech do tend to be stronger.

Also generally speaking, rules that prohibit speech in certain contexts or manners without regard for their content or the speaker (thus not censorship) tend are held to a lower standard for legal justification than laws that do engage in censorship.

In this case, the question is does this type qualify as "not-censorship" because somehow blocking "content that infringes our IP" is not restricting speech on the basis on its content. To me it seems obvious that this is a restriction of speech that depends on it's alleged content.

> In this case, the question is does this type qualify as "not-censorship" because somehow blocking "content that infringes our IP" is not restricting speech on the basis on it's content. To me it seems obvious that this is a restriction of speech that depends on it's alleged content.

To the federal courts, too, which is why “fair use” was a court-created Constitutional limit on copyright before it was incorporated into the statute (the reason for the weird standards in the statute is that the factors from the court-issued rule were incorporated directly into the statute.)

There are different laws. Enforcing laws that limit freedom of information is censorship, be it net filtering or burning books. Enforcing copyright laws is not - you wouldn't call customs intercepting a truck of illegally copied DVDs censorship.

It's not about who does it, it's about why they do it. Is blocking illegal-due-to-copyright content a slippery slope to blocking illegal-because-opressive-regime-said-so content? Yes. Is "slippery slope" a bad argument? Also yes.

I agree having court-enforced IP block lists controlled by private companies is bad. But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.

> you wouldn't call customs intercepting a truck of illegally copied DVDs censorship

I might, depends on the context. Copyright laws can indeed result in censorship. Let's say those DVDs have an additional commentary track.

> But that isn't censorship, it's just stupid.

So when your IP address gets block in Canada for a year, regardless of what content or speech it was engaged in amd without any attempt to verify that you indeed were sharing content out of copyright, you aren't being censored? Come on.

The intent behind the actions matters. China blocks content it is afraid of ( gays, Tianenmen, Taiwan is kind of a country, etc.), while US, UK, Canada, EU, usually block content that violates copyright law. The most recent exception i can think is the "blocking" ( it really isn't blocking, it's removing from some platforms) of Russian state sponsored propaganda, which is also quite easy to justify.

You could say this the other way around: China blocks content that violates the law, US blocks content Congress was lobbied (let's pretend that's not a legalized corruption) to block.

The US Constitution gave Congress the power—but not the obligation–to enact copyright laws in pursuit of certain social goals. A mistake, IMHO, but it was certainly mentioned as something Congress could do at its discretion.

And then the First Amendment promptly nullified that power by categorically stating that the freedom of speech shall not be infringed. Distribution of content is speech, and copyright enforcement penalizes it, which infringes the freedom of speech. This is how the exceptions for Fair Use came about, by attempting to reconcile the Copyright Clause with the First Amendment, but Fair Use is only a half-measure which does not fully avoid the infringement of the freedom of speech. When you have Rule A saying that you may do something and Rule B saying that you must not do that thing, they don't combine to create a compromise rule which says that you can do that thing most of the time with a few narrow exceptions.

So is “subverting the government” in Chinese one. (I suppose.)