Tag: censorship

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An Open Letter to Chris Dodd

[Well written, full of truth:][link]

>Consider this letter our “Don’t tread on me!”. Our agenda is to protect our own liberty to create and our users’ liberty to enjoy those creations as they see fit. We have no give and no compromise on either of those, but long as Hollywood stays out of our patch (that is, no more attempts to lock down our Internet or our tools) we’ll stay out of Hollywood’s.
>
>And if you’d like to discuss some ways of fighting piracy that don’t involve trampling on us and our users, we do have some ideas.

[link]: http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4155 “An Open Letter to Chris Dodd”

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Strike Against SOPA

[What I’ve been working on for the last few days: A site for the January 18th internet blackout to oppose SOPA. Sign up to blackout your site, and send requests to others.][link]

[link]: http://sopastrike.com/ “STRIKE AGAINST SOPA”

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Appeals Court Strikes Down Indecency Rule

[A tiny bit of good news on a dreary day][link]:

>A United States appeals court tossed out the indecency policy of the Federal Communications Commission on Tuesday, calling it a violation of the First Amendment.

Let’s hope we can make it stick.

[link]: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/appeals-court-strikes-down-indecency-rule/ “Appeals Court Strikes Down Indecency Rule – Media Decoder Blog – NYTimes.com”

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Apple Bans Adaptation of James Joyce’s Ulysses from App Store

[Banned due to a scene which features a nude man diving into the ocean][link]. It isn’t even well-rendered generalia, nor is it sexual in nature. It’s just a little lump below his belly. It’s just a penis, which takes up maybe 1/64th of one panel of a comic book.

I guess comic adaptations of James Joyce don’t fit Apple’s definition of “liberal arts.”

[link]: http://www.thebigmoney.com/blogs/app-economy/2010/06/09/joyce-s-ulysses-banned-again-apple-not-government?page=full “Joyce’s Ulysses Banned Again—by Apple, Not the Government | The Big Money”

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F*****M From Porn

[WFMU’s Benjamen Walker on Apple’s terrible text auto-censorship][link] in iTunes.

[link]: http://blog.wfmu.org/freeform/2010/06/fm-from-porn.html “F•••••M From Porn – WFMU’s Beware of the Blog”

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Australia Bans Female Ejaculation, Small Breasts

Buried in [this release about the censorship of porn][link] films are nuggets like this:

>The Board has also started to ban depictions of small-breasted women in adult publications and films.

Waiting for there to be an A-cup political action committed formed with the slogan “from my cold dead hands.”

[link]: http://www.sexparty.org.au/index.php/press-releases/619-depictions-of-female-orgasm-being-banned-by-classification-board “Depictions of Female Orgasm Being Banned by Classification Board”

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Google’s Nexus One Censors Text-To-Speech

[“Don’t be evil” apparently doesn’t cover censorship of words that hurt people’s delicate sensibilities][link]. Pretty clear-cut case of nannyism.

[link]: http://blogs.reuters.com/mediafile/2010/01/22/google’s-nexus-one-muzzles-the-foul-mouthed/ “Google’s Nexus One muzzles the foul-mouthed | Analysis & Opinion | Reuters”

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iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple

Apple’s latest incredible move: *[Censoring a fucking dictionary][link]*. Apple’s conduct re: the App Store has long since passed the yardstick of “stupid” and into “utterly inept.”

If they cannot be trusted to stick to the rules set forth by human society, then fuck ’em. NOBODY censors dictionaries. Not Wal-Mart, not Borders, nobody. Censoring reference material is not just stupid, it is *dangerously* stupid.

[link]: http://daringfireball.net/2009/08/ninjawords “Daring Fireball: Ninjawords: iPhone Dictionary, Censored by Apple”