Greek blog aggregation service administrator jailed, service censored

October 27, 2006

Antonis Tsipropoulos (Αντώνης Τσιπρόπουλος), the administrator of the Greek blog aggregating service blogme.gr, has been sued, arrested and jailed, because one of the linked RSS feeds on his site had satirical content. Although the service was unrelated in any way other than linking to the allegedly offending blog, the blogme.gr server was shut down and its hard drives were confiscated.

Mr Tsipropoulos posted an explanation for the service's downtime, describing his arrest but naming neither the satirical blog nor the plaintiff. Tsipropoulos later removed the explanation at his lawyers' advice because it might appear to be contemptive to the authorities, because it stated that an aggregating service has nothing to do with the various feeds' content. Although Tsipropoulos gave no clues to the identity of the plaintiff, the only satirical blog known to appear in blogme.gr lampooned televangelist and national mysticist Dimosthenis Liakopoulos. It is suspected that Liakopoulos is the plaintiff. More will be known in the upcoming trial.