Category: Censorship

Quote of the Day

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What explains the clampdown mania among liberals? The most obvious answer is because they need an excuse. Consider the history: the right has enjoyed tremendous success over the last few decades, and it is true that conservatives’ capacity for hallucinatory fake-populist appeals has helped them to succeed. But that success has also happened because the Democrats, determined to make themselves the party of the affluent and the highly educated, have allowed the right to get away with it.

—Thomas Frank in The Guardian

He’s right. 

The modern Democratic Party, particularly under Clinton and Obama, was hostile to organized labor, and favored finance and international labor arbitrage over the well-being of the average working American.

Today in Evil, Facebook Edition

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This time, it’s not Zuck, it’s Sheryl Sandburg, who shut down people that Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan did not like. 

What’s more, it is clear from the internal communications, they did so despite Facebook’s publicly stated affection for freedom of speech, because it was more profitable to side with despots.

No big surprise. 

Also not a surprise, Facebook structured it to make it look like a network error, so as few people as possible would know.

This is an Inspired Protest

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Britain has an official board, the British Board of Film Classification (BBFC), to review and censor movies.

It charges the film makers for the costs of censoring their movies, to the tune of  £101.50 plys £7.09 per minute of film.

British film maker and journalist Charlie Lyne had a kickstarter to make a protest film, and when he totaled up the costs, he submitted a 10+ hour of film of paint drying:

The British Board of Film Classification (BBFC) has determined that Charlie Lyne’s 10-hour Paint Drying contains “no material likely to offend or harm”, and has accordingly awarded it a “suitable for all” U certificate.

Nicely described by the BBFC as “a film showing paint drying on a wall”, Paint Drying is the result of a Kickstarter campaign aimed at highlighting the “prohibitively expensive” cost of presenting cinematic works for classification.

The BBFC charges a £101.50 submission fee and £7.09 per minute of film. However, it is obliged to sit through every single frame of material, so Lyne decided he’d make the censors work for their money.

He originally planned to raise £109 for a symbolic one-minute submission of paint drying, but ultimately attracted pledges of £5,936, financing an extended 607-minute submission to the BBFC.

It took 2 days for the BBFC to review the film.

Today in IP Insanity

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The city of Inglewood, California attempted to use copyright to prevent people from posting videos of their city council meetings.

Thankfully, thee judge called bullsh%$ on the town’s arguments:

Joseph Teixeira doesn’t like Inglewood Mayor James T. Butts, so he makes Youtube videos featuring City Council meeting footage.

The Mayor and Council decided to silence their critic by paying to register the videos of their city meetings with the US Copyright Office, then spending $50,000 in taxpayer money to retain a lawyer to sue Teixeira for copyright infringement.

The court was unimpressed with Inglewood’s leaders: it ruled that the council meetings weren’t copyrightable; that councils can’t make money from public records; and that the videos — in the event that they used anything copyrighted — were fair use. Now they face the possibility that Teixeira will recover fees for his pro bono counsel — more tax dollars flushed away in an illegal bid to prevent a critic from speaking.

Then there’s the Streisand Effect: in bringing this action, the City of Inglewood increased traffic to Teixeira’s videos by five hundred percent.

(emphasis original)

It’s nice that the judge slapped them down firmly.

Increasingly, IP is used to censor criticism and to privatize the public space, and it is a bad thing.

Guck Foogle

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After requiring that blogs with adult content to label themselves as such for over a decade (forever in internet time) Google is now using this labeling to kick the blogs out:

Google is banning public explicit photos and videos from its blogging service Blogger, and giving affected users just one month to comply.

The new rules require any blog with “sexually explicit or graphic nude images or video” to take them down by 23 March, or the blog will be made private by Google. A private blog can only be seen by the owner or admins of the blog, and people who the owner has shared the blog with.

Google promises that the majority of users of the service, which Google acquired from Twitter co-founder Evan Williams’ Pyra Labs in 2003, won’t see any change from the new rules. But many users are concerned that the new rules represent a huge about-turn from Google’s previously stated support of explicit material on its platform. The company’s previous policy said: “We do allow adult content on Blogger, including images or videos that contain nudity or sexual activity … All blogs marked as ‘adult’ will be placed behind an ‘adult content’ warning interstitial.” Its only exceptions were to ban illegal explicit content, explicit images shared without the subject’s consent (commonly known as “revenge porn”) and making money on adult content.

Zoe Margolis, author of the Girl with a One Track Mind books and sex blog, joined Blogger in 2004. She says that “either Google believes in freedom of expression, or it doesn’t. Restricting blogs which contain explicit content to ‘private only’ effectively kills them off. This is like offering a library where all the books in it are invisible to the readers unless an author is standing there and personally hands each reader a copy of their book.”

Let me note that my ox is not gored on this.

While I may be f%$#ing profane, I tend to %$# out that sh%$ when I use those f%$#ing words.

Google needs to get its f%$#ing head out of its f%$#ing ass.

They should also admit that they have dropped the word, “Don’t,” from its favorite logo.

Their new logo is, “Be evil.”