Censorship 101

As reported at Huffington and MSN Money,

Microsoft's new Chinese internet portal has banned the words "democracy" and "freedom" from parts of its website in an apparent effort to avoid offending Beijing's political censors. Attempts to input words in Chinese such as "democracy" prompted an error message from the site: "This item contains forbidden speech. Please delete the forbidden speech from this item." Other phrases banned included the Chinese for "demonstration", "democratic movement" and "Taiwan independence".

Microsoft claims to be 'when in Rome'-ing, but Chinese law doesn't prevent the use of these words. Are they just overachievers?