orcishgamer: Jefe is right, we consider our freedom of speech to be extremely sacrosanct here, something which will seem largely foreign to people in other countries who generally feel like they have freedom in the realm of speech, but we, in the US, would generally find them constrained. It's not that we believe people should be bigoted assholes, it's that we believe in their right to be bigoted assholes so long as they stop at being generally unpleasant (i.e. don't commit any actual crimes).
And the US is a shining beacon of light in this. As many of you know in many, if not in most European states the freedom of speech is more limited. The examples are many, from Sweden to the Netherlands, the UK, France and of course Germany. Your country stand as a good example for us to follow and I think you still have great influence.
In my country, freedom of speech is strong in practice, while a little more limited in theory. There is an actual law against blasphemy that hasn't been used since I think, early in the last century? When some of those Mohammed cartoons were published in Norwegian newspapers someone tried to use those laws unsuccessfully. What I don't understand is why those laws weren't removed. I hope they will be soon.
There is also a law against some type of racism. As far as I know it has only been used in a murder case and back in the nineties when they made an racist political party illegal. But racism should be legal (as long as it doesn't include any threats or instigation of violence of course). Racism should instead be fought with arguments instead of force.
Besides that the major difference compared to the US is that the right to privacy stands stronger here and thus makes some limits to the freedom of speech. For example in the US there seem to be common practice to give all convicted criminals the full name in the news. And is it common practice for those that are just under suspicion too or is that just leaks?
In Norway convicted criminals aren't named in the newspapers and I think that is very good. While the limit it constitutes on the freedom of speech is problematic, I think the practical consequences of having peoples name "destroyed" weighs against it. Especially in the internet age, having your name brought down in the mud constitutes an extra punishment. Unfortunately, in later years there have been a trend where people who are under suspicion in a much published case are named on blogs and small newspapers until it is so well known that even the big newspapers can write about it.
Apart from that i think the same limitations apply as in the US:
That you cannot tell lies about people to defame them.
That you cannon make threats or instigate violence.
Fraud.
Any more?
Ah I just remembered. This is embarrassing. Norway still has a very silly law against hardcore pornography. Hardcore pornography is the kind of pornography where you see sexual organs in motion or where there is a focus on the sexual organs or something like that. For some reason this was thought to be worse than softcore pornography. Well it is in my opinion quite silly to outlaw the photographic description of something so healthy and important but that is how it is :-)
As far as I remember it was last brought up in the parliament circa 10 years ago. But due to the influence of some feminist organizations with some strange ideology, the law remained in force. Some soft porn magazine went to court to try to change it after that but were not successful. This law has always just been used against TV, magazines and video.
When the internet got popular the anti-pornography people must have understood that they had no chance, for as far as I know there has never been any attempts to censor internet porn.
With the internet, hardcore porn has become extremely available so there isn't much push for to remove the law but in my opinion it is a disgrace. If it weren't for the internet you would think that the law would have been removed by now or at least that there would be a strong movement against it.
And in the past our freedom of speech was much more limited. Strong computer game violence is such a young phenomenon that no games were ever censored or forbidden here. But in the 80's and early 90's it was common for some kind of government board to censor the very violent movies before release. The most objectionable scenes were cut and the worst movies were outright banned.
When Life of Brian came out it was banned in Norway for a year. (Which led to it being advertised in Sweden as "So funny it was banned in Norway!")