Wrong!

The essential global news network does not know what the hell it is talking about.

Item: Brazilian Judge Reverses YouTube Ban (AP/Forbes).

Like Typhoid Mary, the Associated Press is repeating disinformation on this story, and infecting others.

In a day and age when more and more news is passed along through syndication rather than developed independently, it is more urgent than ever that we apply bullshit filtration to the pipes.

Because some content syndicates are actually rackets.

A Brazilian judge reversed course Tuesday and lifted an order that led to a ban of YouTube across much of the country because a sexy video of supermodel Daniela Cicarelli and her boyfriend kept circulating against the boyfriend’s wishes.

The Brazilian judge declared, and I am looking at his declaration right now, that it was never his intention to ban YouTube.com in its entirety.

That implication, seized upon by Telefonica and Brasil Telecom here, was the product of an egregious procedural irregularity on the part of another judge who sought to reverse what was, in essence, an unfavorable outcome in a SLAPP suit against YouTube and its parent.

But no legitimate court order was ever issued to that effect.

“YouTube.com Blocked by Court Order”?

Officially, and for all legal intents and purposes, it never happened.

It may be that the “clarification” here is worded so that the ISPs who moved to block YouTube.com are not to be held liable for having obeyed an illegal court order.

In which case they are getting off light.

IANAL.

But that the order was illegal, and never had effect, is not in question.

Which means it cannot be “reversed.”

Can we get straight on that?

The question now: Were the actions taken by Telefonica and Brasil Telecom legal? Or can they be sued for blocking YouTube on their backbone?

The three other backbone owners here did not block YouTube.com.

I have been able to watch YouTube videos throughout, for example, on my sputtering Net Virtua cable broadband connection, which is owned by Globo and the Mexican oligarch Carlos Slim.

But Neuza did see YouTube vanish from the air yesterday, replaced by a statement with the Telefonica logo saying that it was blocked “pursuant to a court order.”

Lie!

What enquiring minds now want to know is whether the São Paulo “first instance”  administrative judge who vandalized the ruling by the desembargador, or “first-instance” trier of fact, was bribed to do it.

Shocking as it may seem, and although Brazil has many, many fine lawyers and judges who fight the good fight every day for the integrity of their profession and the good of the res publica, some of these people in the judiciary really are cartoonish Latin American crooks.