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I don't think it legitimizes censorship. Rather, it makes censorship obvious and unmistakable. A generic status code (like 403) is indistinguishable from a tech

I don't think it legitimizes censorship. Rather, it makes censorship obvious and unmistakable. A generic status code (like 403) is indistinguishable from a technical error and obfuscates the existence of censorship.

jsprogrammer 11y ago
A devious censor probably would not explicitly call out their censorship with a standard HTTP code. It seems undeniable that this "feature" codifies censorship, making it more "acceptable". "Oh, well they used the right code anyway" back to approved activities
- pcl 11y ago
  IIRC, the general rationale behind the 451 RFC was that this provides a means for a third party to communicate that they are censoring the content, presumably begrudgingly. So, in the case at hand, GitHub is using 451 to communicate that a government censor has required that they take some content down, not that the company itself has decided to remove the data of its own volition.
- morninj 11y ago
  If you send a DMCA takedown notice, you don't get to choose the status code that gets displayed after the content is removed.