kagablog

The internet chapter of the Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, a secret copyright treaty whose text Obama’s administration refused to disclose due to “national security” concerns, has leaked. It’s bad. It says:

* * That ISPs have to proactively police copyright on user-contributed material. This means that it will be impossible to run a service like Flickr or YouTube or Blogger, since hiring enough lawyers to ensure that the mountain of material uploaded every second isn’t infringing will exceed any hope of profitability.

* * That ISPs have to cut off the Internet access of accused copyright infringers or face liability. This means that your entire family could be denied to the internet — and hence to civic participation, health information, education, communications, and their means of earning a living — if one member is accused of copyright infringement, without access to a trial or counsel.

* * That the whole world must adopt US-style “notice-and-takedown” rules that require ISPs to remove any material that is accused — again, without evidence or trial — of infringing copyright. This has proved a disaster in the US and other countries, where it provides an easy means of censoring material, just by accusing it of infringing copyright.

* * Mandatory prohibitions on breaking DRM, even if doing so for a lawful purpose (e.g., to make a work available to disabled people; for archival preservation; because you own the copyrighted work that is locked up with DRM)

this article first appeared on boingboing.net

“Tease was out, honesty was in.”

By Jack Stevenson

Few Americans remember, but forty years ago Denmark passed a revolutionary piece of legislation that brought an end to image (film and publication) censorship and branded the country as the most liberated society on Earth. (Take that, Sweden!) American film historian Jack Stevenson, a resident of Demark for 17 years, looks back at the chain of events that led up to this groundbreaking legislation, what the end result was and how it impacted sexual culture in America and brought a de facto end to film censorship there. (Stevenson’s book, Scandinavian Blue, is to be published by McFarland in early 2010 and this text serves as a kind of condensation of some of its broader themes.)
* * *

Introduction

That the 1960s was a ground-breaking chapter in Danish history goes without saying. Concepts pioneered at the time such as sexual liberation, gender equality and collectivism have had lasting impact. “Cultural warriors” on both sides of the ideological divide are still today arguing about the legacy of this pivotal era. As witnessed by all the anniversary reappraisals of 1968 that filled the Danish press in 2008, the ’60s is still very much in the public consciousness.

Danes are less aware of the impact their “revolution” had in foreign countries where one specific event, the abolition of censorship in the summer of 1969, quickly led to Denmark being hailed as the most sexually free society in the world. The news was carried to every corner of the globe by newspapers, magazines and especially film. Soon a host of documentaries, literary adaptations and erotic dramas were promoting the mythology of Denmark as ground zero of the global sexual revolution on the movie screens of the world.

This idea of Denmark as a carnal paradise was accepted more readily in America than almost anywhere else, and a handful of movies that are scarcely remembered today ended up taking God’s Own Country (as Danes call America) by storm.
* * *

Summer with MonikaThat Nordic folk were open-minded in sexual matters was not a new concept in the Anglo-Saxon world. This idea went back to the early ’50s when Swedish films like Hun dansede en sommernat (One Summer of Happiness, 1951); Sommeren med Monika (Summer with Monika, 1953) and Ogift Fader Sökes (Unmarried Mothers, 1953) lit up the screens of art houses and drive-ins alike. Through the ’50s and into the ’60s the stereotype of the sexually liberated Swedish blonde became firmly entrenched in American popular culture.

Denmark’s belated contribution to the cause of film freedom came in 1959 in the form of a drama entitled En Fremmed Banker På (A Stranger Knocks, 1959). Set during the occupation, it featured an act of intercourse (obscured by clothing) in which the woman reached climax, and while not a particularly big hit in the U.S., it was to have major impact on the laws governing American censorship. As Amos Vogel writes in his landmark work from 1974, Film as a Subversive Art, “the entire plot pivots on an act of intercourse, during which the woman accidentally discovers the vital clue to the film’s mystery. The complete absence of nudity and total relevance of the scene to the plot posed an impossible problem for the American censors, and led, upon appeals against its prohibition, to the abolition by the Supreme Court of the entire system of American state censorship in 1967. This development later contributed in a major way to sexual permissiveness in the American cinema.”

I, a WomanThe first film to test the limits of this new permissiveness was also Danish: Jeg — en Kvinde: (I, A Woman). Produced by the prolific Peer Guldbrandsen, it was based on Siv Holm’s (aka Agenthe Thomsen’s) best-selling book of the same title from 1961 and would become the first true Scandinavian blockbuster of the ’60s. Shot in the summer of 1965, the Danish press dubbed it the most daring movie ever filmed on home soil, “half pornographic.” When it opened in Denmark on September 17 of the same year, it was ridiculed by reviewers but proved wildly popular with the public. Its review in Variety caught the attention of American distributor Radley Metzger, who flew to Copenhagen and purchased world rights for a paltry sum. He went on to sell the film to 35 separate territories, and profits from the picture allowed him to launch his own filmmaking career. (Guldbrandsen would be derided for years by pundits in the Danish film world for making one of the worst deals in film history.)

This tale of a single woman who insists on having a free sexual life without commitment provoked endless scandal in America where shows were stopped by police in several states and theatre employees were jailed, despite the fact that the U.S.-released print had the four raciest scenes censored out of it. Dragged into court in various cities, the film was invariably cleared by juries. To the dismay of moralists and the film establishment, it went on to play in many “respectable” theatres. It set box office records, becoming the most popular Danish film to date and redefining how female sexuality was depicted in film.

The GiftDebate about erotic freedom was evolving on a more complex level in Denmark than in America, as revealed by the next significant Danish film to deal with sexual topics, Knud Leif Thomsen’s Gift, from the following year. This was the tale of an arrogant young man who insinuates himself into a well-to-do family by seducing the teenage daughter and then confronting her parents with his aggressively hedonist philosophies, a kind of “gospel of the flesh.” It was released in Denmark in late March of 1966 and imported to the States in January of 1968 as Venom. This was no plug for sexual liberation but rather a dire warning about the younger generation’s lack of spiritual awareness and addiction to pornography. Downbeat stuff, that, so the Americans just glossed over its message and promoted it as the latest “sex-sation” from Denmark — even though in its (universally) censored version there was nary a flash of bare skin. Several prominent American critics managed to see through the hype and what they saw they liked. The New York Times found its generation gap theme to be of particular interest and rated the acting first-class, while Archer Winsten, a major critic who wrote for The New York Post, declared it to be one of the best foreign films of the year. Playboy called it honest and clear-sighted, a jolt of “shock therapy.”

It had received very different treatment from Danish reviewers — close to total condemnation, in fact. But crowds were massive, drawn by the widely reported news that Thomsen had intended to incorporate actual hardcore porn into the film. This had touched off a very public brawl with the censorship board, which finally agreed not to cut out the offending scenes but to obscure them with large white Xs. Whatever its artistic merit or lack thereof, Gift managed to set in motion a wider discussion on censorship in Denmark, and ironically a film that was preaching against pornography proved instrumental in ending censorship a few years down the road.

The nuances of these issues were largely lost on Americans, who insisted on seeing sexual liberation as a simple matter of the freedom to fuck, and anyway Sweden still remained firmly branded in the Anglo-Saxon consciousness as the homeland of open-mindedness. This was thanks in large part to Americans’ notorious inability to visualize Denmark on the world map and the fact that Swedish films were much bigger hits. Jeg er Nysgerrig — gul (I Am Curious Yellow, 1967), for example, grossed somewhere between 10 and 20 million dollars in the States compared to 3 million for I, A Woman. Actually most Americans thought that was a Swedish film too, due to its having a Swedish director-photographer (Mac Ahlberg) and star (Essy Persson), and technically being a Danish-Swedish co-production. Denmark was still very much overshadowed by Sweden.

All that changed in the summer of 1969, when Denmark passed legislation abolishing censorship and threw a huge “coming-out’ party called SEX 69, a porn trade fair that attracted 100,000 paid admissions and 200 foreign journalists. Visitors wandered awestruck amongst the forest of dildoes, cascades of dirty magazines, blow-up dolls and other rubber goods Danish producers could now openly offer, while striptease “happenings” sprang to life around them.

In one fell swoop Denmark had stolen the spotlight from its neighbour across the Øresund Strait. Sexuality in Swedish films had always been depicted with naturalism (nude swims in the moonlight, winds blowing through wheat fields, etc.) or via the bleak existentialism of Bergman, most prominently on display in The Silence, and suddenly all of this felt very old-fashioned. What was suddenly modern was hard-core porn; sweaty and unapologetic with all the grunts, groans and slapping bodies intact. Tease was out, honesty was in. No matter that Sweden had been producing hard-core porn for years without a fuss; what was happening in Denmark had the feel of a revolution, and this was a rebellion steeped in philosophy and not just commercialism.

But America wasn’t quite ready for hard-core porn, and the first film to be imported after Denmark passed its landmark legislation was the decidedly soft-core Uden en Trævl (Without A Stitch), which had actually been produced in 1968. Based on the 1966 novel by the Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe, it starred leggy new discovery Anne Grete Nissen, who played Lilian, an erotically inhibited high school girl who hitchhikes through Europe seeking sexual experience. It was made by Palladium, which picked Annelise Meineche to direct. They were hoping she could recreate the box office magic of her 1965 hit Sytten (Soya’s 17), but Danish critics deemed it a ridiculous embarrassment to the sexual revolution, one critic even blasting it as “counter-revolutionary.” Bjørneboe was also unhappy. His book had been about open-mindedness and sexual equality, and was intended as a blow against Norwegian-style authoritarianism — and Palladium had turned it into “glad porn.”

Without a Stitch Without a Stitch

Obscenity charges kept the film on ice in the U.S. through most of 1969, but in December a jury found it not obscene and, surprisingly, it was approved for release without any cuts. The uncensored version opened in January 1970 in New York at Loew’s flagship theatre on Broadway, and crowds streamed in to see it. Without a Stitch completed the trend that I, A Woman had started: soft-core films playing in respectable mainstream theatres.

Once again American critics saw things in a completely different light. Here reviewers from The New York Times to the Village Voice to The New York Post and even Screw magazine were won over by Nissen’s good looks and didn’t bother to quibble about nuances like the film’s underlying philosophy. Here, finally, was a sex film that gave the viewer his money’s worth!

Conservative Americans thought otherwise. They found the message and spirit of the film highly offensive even though it was technically a soft-core picture shot in a cheerful style. A judge in California declared that “the English language does not provide adjectives sufficient to describe the utter rottenness of this sordid product of subhuman depravity and greed that portrays every known form of sexual perversion.” Industry figures also railed against it, most notably MPAA (Motion Picture Association of America) boss Jack Valenti, who called it pornographic trash unsuited to be advertised in poster display cases.

But advertised it was, and aggressively so. “You have never seen it photographed before!” screamed a full page in the Village Voice. “This is the first film to enter the U.S. from Denmark since its liberalization of permissiveness! Denmark — the country that had already gained a reputation of being the world’s most permissive — has gone one step further . . . American audiences of the ’70s may be astounded and shocked by Denmark’s newest motion picture, Without a Stitch, which makes I Am Curious Yellow instantly obsolete. But more so, it’s a good movie. One that American audiences will like, understand and enjoy. Women will empathize and identify with the beautiful heroine. Men will immediately love her.”

If American moralists thought nothing could be worse than Uden en Trævl, they were in for a big surprise. Ratings boards like the MPAA had less and less power to determine what was shown in theatres, and courts almost always ruled in favour of the films. The last vestiges of American screen censorship, in force since the establishment of the Production Code of 1934, were about to fall, and once again the movies responsible for this came from Denmark.

A number of American filmmakers had travelled to the SEX 69 convention, and, not content to let Danish directors monopolize the field, they had shot reams of 16mm footage from which they would fashion their own films about the sex-mad Danes. These would be tailored specifically for the American market, and most never even opened in Denmark.

Relatively chaste films like Without a Stitch were suddenly out of style as viewers demanded increasingly explicit fare. Soon hundreds of porn films were surfacing with “Danish” or “Copenhagen” in the title. Many were cheap frauds that had nothing to do with the country, but a few would turn out to be deeply influential on American sexual morality and the course of film censorship.

On June 17, 1970, The New York Times’ leading film critic, Vincent Canby, reviewed one such film, Censorship in Denmark, by Alex de Renzy. It was an explicit documentary that mixed footage of Copenhagen tourist attractions with on-the-street interviews and hardcore scenes from the city’s live sex clubs and movies. This was the first time that a major American paper had ever reviewed a movie that contained scenes of coitus, fellatio and cunnilingus — and had even reviewed it sympathetically.

What is obscene? Sexual Freedom in DenmarkFour days later Canby followed up with a larger article headlined “Have You Tried Danish Blue?” It appeared right next to a review of Rudolf Nureyev’s latest ballet, and in it Canby discussed all three of the Danish sex films then playing in New York. In addition to Censorship in Denmark, they included John Lamb’s Sexual Freedom in Denmark and Wide Open Copenhagen 1970. This coverage in America’s most respected daily paper instantly legitimized these movies and made it permissible for middle-class audiences to attend. Porn was no longer just for perverts. By contextualizing it as a Danish social phenomenon, filmmakers were able to equate porn with all sorts of deeper political and sociological rationales and to fashion their movies as serious documentaries, which would help them dodge heat from the law. Tone meant everything. Furthermore, the court cases that Lamb’s and de Renzy’s films were inevitably caught up in set precedents that helped usher in the era of hardcore as a theatrical experience.

These films conveyed to Americans the mythology of Danes as radically liberated and sexually insatiable yet somehow completely matter-of-fact about it all. Americans were only too happy to believe this, and the films also had a certain exotic allure as they were as close as most Yanks would ever get to Copenhagen, a city that many still thought was the capital of Sweden or Holland. For their part, Danes were at best only dimly aware of how they were being perceived since most of these films never played in Denmark.

In 1972, with the production of films like Behind the Green Door and Deep Throat, America’s own porn industry came of age, and the country’s fascination with Danish sexuality began to fade. Danish sexploitation cinema, which lasted roughly from 1965 to 1975, was fuelled by co-production arrangements with foreign partners who hoped to cash in on the sex wave, and when Danish skin flicks fell out of fashion they stopped investing. In fact, when the two above-mentioned erotic films came to Denmark, Danes were the ones being fascinated, hailing them as far more daring and quality conscious than any Danish erotic film to date. Already back in 1970, the American porn trailblazer Mona had forced some Danes in the industry to concede that it was “far better than what has previously been seen from Swedish and Danish producers. . . . The USA is better at porno than we are.”

Denmark was to most Americans still a mythical land of liberation, but now the censorship barriers had been smashed and the yoke of ’50s repression had been cast off. By the mid-’70s, even Catholic countries like France had their own hard-core porn industries.

Yet Danish films like Jeg — en Kvinde (I, A Woman), Uden en trævl (Without a Stitch), Sonja — 16 år (Relations — the Love Story From Denmark), and Det Kærlige Legetøj (Danish Blue), and the above-mentioned films shot by American directors (which also must include Frigjorte Christa, aka Swedish Fly Girls, by the American Jack O’Connell), were critically important to America’s sexual coming of age. Unbeknownst to most Danes, and still disrespected or simply ignored by today’s Danish film establishment, these movies helped make America a much more sexually progressive society.

this article first published on brightlightsfilm.com

monday october 6 2008

Last Friday, adult director Paul Little, aka Max Hardcore, was sentenced to 46 months in prison. Back in June, Little had been found guilty on 20 federal counts of distributing obscene material over the internet and through the US mail. At his sentencing in Tampa, Florida, where federal agents had bought the materials in question, Little asked Judge Susan C. Bucklew for what appeared to be mercy. “I didn’t realize I’d made a mistake,” he told the court. “My entire life I’ve been trying to do the right thing by people and by the law.” A sentiment to which Judge Bucklew replied: “Mr. Little, I find this almost incredible.”

Indeed, Little’s porn story is more that of a man who wanted to find out how far he could push the law before it snared him. Since the early Nineties, he has committed himself to exploring the farthest reaches of the pornographic frontier. As an auteur, he came into his own in the golden age of gonzo-porno. With the advent of video, porn was delivered into any American home with a video player. Meanwhile, any aspiring pornographer who could get his hands on a video camera could shoot low budget porn on the fly. Alongside his peers in the movement–John “The Buttman” Stagliano and Adam “Seymore Butts” Glasser among them–Little was the dick-for-hire star of his own lo-fi productions. Yet while Stagliano and Glasser inhabited oversexed personalities on camera, who reveled in the pleasures of sexually adventurous lives shot cinéma vérité style, Little, armed with a half-crazed grin, a George W. Bush cowboy hat, and a set that consisted primarily of a yellow sofa, appeared hellbent on taking human sexuality to the outer limits. At a time when the Clinton administration was taking a mostly hands-off approach to obscenity prosecutions, and the Wild, Wild West of the Internet meant distribution was easy and censorship was turning into an antiquated concept, extreme porn became the new new thing.

In Max Hardcore movies–”Anal Agony,” “Hardcore Schoolgirls,” “Max! Don’t Fuck Up My Mommy!”–women are verbally and physically degraded in an unprecedented myriad of ways. They are choked, slapped, throat-fucked, penetrated with fists, given enemas, pile-driven, urinated upon, vomited upon, and in some instances instructed to drink from glasses the money shots that have been delivered into their rectums. Most of the time, Little as Hardcore is the perpetrator of these acts. Not infrequently, his scenes are fraught with pedophilia themes, beginning when he stumbles upon his subjects in playgrounds, where they sit alone, in pigtails, talking baby-talk, and sucking on lollipops. Mostly, the sex scenes end with his latest costar a mess and Hardcore triumphant. Even for the most jaded porn watcher, Little’s ouevre is over the top. Watching Little’s work is less like watching a porn movie than it is akin to witnessing a vivisection. On the screen, Hardcore bends over the female bodies before him, sometimes with speculum in hand, as if attempting to get at something within her at which he can never quite get, and so to which he is doomed to return, his methods more and more hardcore.

In Porn Valley, Little is something of a pariah. The larger, more mainstream-oriented and consumer-friendly adult production companies like Vivid Video and Wicked Pictures pride themselves on turning out adult content that plays by the rules, thereby, they hope, protecting the industry from legal persecution. In contrast, Little and company, other producers believe, put the entire industry at risk by creating content more likely to be targeted in obscenity indictments. (See: The Cambria List.) In 2005, the Bush administration launched its so-called “War on Porn,” forming the Obscenity Prosecution Task Force, a Department of Justice outfit dedicated to pursuing obscenity prosecutions, and the FBI began recruiting for a “porn squad,” otherwise known as the Adult Obscenity Squad, focused on “manufacturers and purveyors” of pornography. In late 2005, federal agents raided Little’s offices in Altadena, California, but it wasn’t until early 2007 that his indictment was unsealed. As it turned out, OPTF Director Brent Ward had found getting US Attorneys to pursue obscenity prosecutions wasn’t easy. Consequently, US Attorneys who preferred dedicating their resources to crimes other than obscenity in districts more likely to win the administration obscenity convictions were eliminated. Late last year, the OPTF’s first trial began in Phoenix, Arizona, pitting the US government against a producer of bukkake videos, but the result was an embarrassment, the pornographer slipping out of the government’s hands in the courtroom. When it came to Little, prosecutors were gunning for a win. Finally, three years after the OPTF was formed, the Feds got their man.

According to Jezebel’s Megan Carpentier, we’ve come a long way, baby, when it comes to porn. “Say what you will about pornography, objectification and exploitation, the growing legitimization of the pornography industry–which led to much more government- and self-regulation–also led to a significant decrease in the kind of exploitation described by those performers as well as increased opportunities for women to participate in the higher-earning aspects of the production.” Where Carpentier came upon her theory regarding the current state of the adult movie industry is a mystery. One would have to assume her research didn’t include watching this NSFW series of video clips, in which a young woman is gangbanged, instructed to crawl across the floor on all-fours while stating repeatedly, “I’m a fucking whore,” and then directed to drink the contents of a dog bowl, the side of which reads “SHIT-HOLE,” into which her costars have ejaculated. The video wasn’t directed by Little; these days, extreme porn is everywhere you Google.

Of course, what we are talking about here is not the girl on the floor, but the letter of the law. Yesterday, former lawyer, Salon blogger, and bestselling author Glenn Greenwald, whose First Amendment client list included Matthew Hale, a neo-Nazi who mistakenly attempted to enlist an undercover FBI agent to kill a federal judge, posits the conviction and sentencing of Paul Little as the latest glaring example of Bush administration hypocrisy. According to Greenwald, porn consists of “films featuring only consenting adults and distributed only to those consenting adults who chose to purchase them.” Ironically, Little’s defense, Greenwald points out, is the same defense the Bush administration has used to defend interrogation techniques used on detainees: “because the acts in question didn’t involve the infliction of severe pain, they weren’t illegal.” In the case of Little’s videos, he asserts, “There was no suggestion that any serious violence was ever inflicted or that the adult actors in the film were anything other than completely consensual.” In conclusion, he proclaims: “So, to recap, in the Land of the Free: if you’re an adult who produces a film using other consenting adults, for the entertainment of still other consenting adults, which merely depicts fictional acts of humiliation and degradation, the DOJ will prosecute you and send you to prison for years.”

Reading Greenwald’s post, I wondered if he had ever watched a Max Hardcore movie. I sent him an email, asking if he had. A few minutes later, I received a reply. “No, I haven’t. But I read about its content. Why?” I replied: “You should.” He replied: “I really don’t care what consenting adults do with one another in order to entertain themselves or please themselves sexually–I’m not a busy body trying to sit in judgment of what other adults choose to do with themselves, especially in their sex lives. Not even the Government claimed that these films involved minors or non-consent, so as far as I’m concerned, it’s nobody’s business what they do, and whatever they do isn’t going to change my mind in the slightest.” In 1964, US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart opined famously of pornography: “I know it when I see it.” In Greenwald’s case, one would imagine it would be hard to know what one has seen if one has not, in fact, seen it. If one hasn’t seen “it,” how can one know what one has seen?

On an online message board, a member who calls himself “Sick Fuck” posted an inventory of Max Hardcore’s most extreme scenes. The list is long. Some of the videos were created for European distribution, where the market is more permissive, an argument Little used to defend the graphic nature of his videos to little effect in the Tampa courtroom. The litany of highlights includes urination, defecation, and vomiting, all of which appear repeatedly. As a matter of fact, the image located at the top of this post is a still from one such video, the European edition of “Planet Max 16.” Her name is Summer Luv. In the scene, her costar, Catalina, who was Little’s girlfriend, vomits on Summer. Their three-way sex with Little includes fisting and a mechanical device that holds Summer’s mouth open as he ejaculates onto her face, upon which a clown smile has been drawn. The other extremely explicit, NSFW images can be found here. Because if you’re going to talk about how far we’ve come when it comes to porn, if you’re going to posit Paul “Max Hardcore” Little as the latest victim of the Bush administration, if you’re going to lament one more strike against your First Amendment rights, you should bear witness as to what a porn star drenched in vomit looks like. Otherwise, you’re blind when it comes to the hardcore realities of making porn in the 21st century. After all, as the bukkake video producer who squirmed out of the OPTF’s grasp once told me: “If people didn’t want it, it wouldn’t be made.” That is, if you didn’t want it, they wouldn’t make it. In the end, porn is the real American dream, and the dream is all yours.

Posted by Susannah Breslin on her blog reversecowgirl

Friday, Feb. 6th, 2009 LA MDC

Greetings friends and fans,

I’m sorry that I haven’t contacted everyone before this late date, but recent extraordinary events have overwhelmed me, and rendered me incapable of anything but defensive actions. This is actually the very first opportunity that I have had to sit down and collect my thoughts in sufficient quantity and clarity to justify writing to you at all. I hope you are all in the best of health, and free to move about your world without having to ask permission to do so.

I want to assure you that physically I feel great, as I’ve made some very positive changes in my life, ridding myself of the grip that cigarettes and alcohol have had on my health and well-being. I must confess that I had little choice in the matter because I am presently incarcerated in a federal prison, but these are changes that will help me regain my health and renew my spirit and ultimately emerge from this prison a better man.

Some said it was inevitable that I should pass through here someday, because I’ve always had a problem with authorities telling me what I can and cannot do – but it still seems surreal that I’m in here not for what Paul Little did as a person, but for what the fictional character Max Hardcore did in a movie. Movies that no one was forced to watch (well, except inside a federal courthouse), movies that we as adults in this country ostensibly have the freedom to enjoy or ignore.

The authorities have finally jailed me on the incredibly vague and subjective crime of “obscenity”. Of course, the United States government took it upon itself to order and scrutinize these films despite the fact that no one in the community where I was tried had complained about them. It was clear at my trial that none of the jurors from Tampa Bay had ever seen anything like my videos, but those same people have decided what adults all over this country and, by extension, all over the world can watch in the privacy of their homes. And these films were presented to this jury not in their entirety, but in a way crafted by a judge concerned primarily by perceived “demeaning treatment” in the movies, including the use of “harsh and abusive language” as directed toward certain female actresses in a small number of my movies. Seems strange that an administration that condoned real torture would be so shocked and concerned about “demeaning treatment” and “harsh language” between consenting adult actors in a fictional film, but that’s what happened…

Amazingly, the jury went along with the whole government program, as I now know they almost always do, and convicted me on all 10 counts. The judge sentenced me to 46 months and a fine of nearly one hundred thousand dollars. I’m holding out hope that I can get conviction overturned in a higher court, but it’s an uphill battle that few ever win. Until the ridiculous Miller test of obscenity is thrown onto the trash heap of judicial history, I’m afraid just about any controversial artist could be convicted of it. The laws on the books are clearly out of step with what the public has demanded, so I’m sure it is only a matter of time before the government gets out of the business of trying to enforce morality. However, in the meantime, I would encourage all of you to spread the word about this case throughout the adult and mainstream entertainment industries, as well as letting your representatives in government know how outraged you are about this gross infringement on your freedom of speech.

They are flicking the lights in here and that means it’s time to head off to our cells and be counted in for the night. But I’ll write back soon and let you know how things are going, and pass on the benefit of my experience here. Until then, stay positive and live every day as if it were your last.

Sincerely,
Paul F. Little

Mailing Address

Paul F. Little, Federal # 44902-112
Section 5-North
Metropolitan Detention Center, Los Angeles
P.O. Box 1500
Los Angeles, CA 90053

§ 107. Limitations on exclusive rights: Fair use

Notwithstanding the provisions of sections 106 and 106A, the fair use of a copyrighted work, including such use by reproduction in copies or phonorecords or by any other means specified by that section, for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
The fact that a work is unpublished shall not itself bar a finding of fair use if such finding is made upon consideration of all the above factors.

“Only stupid dictatorships ban books without understanding that you just give it publicity by doing so. Real democracies censor you by ignoring you.”

Roberto Saviano

By Austin Modine

A South African government official is calling for the country to pursue a complete ban on pornography as a way to combat online child porn.

On Tuesday, South Africa’s Department of Home Affairs said it’s developing an inter-departmental protocol to shield kids against child porn in time for the country hosting the 2010 World Cup next June. While details are vague, the DHA’s Deputy Minster Malusi Gigaba is advocating an extremely hard-line approach to the issue:

“South Africa should explore an outright ban on pornography in the public media as is the practice in countries such as China and India,” Gigaba stated in the Department’s announcement. He further vowed to approach the South African Law Reform Commission with a request to investigate and make recommendations on instituting the ban.

“The increase of access to technology and mobile internet, with all its benefits, also poses risks such as creation and distribution of child pornography,” Gigaba stated. “We need to be proactive in protecting children against this heinous crime.”

South Africa would join an ever-lengthening list of countries that have decided to make porn a criminal offense, including the recent induction of Ukraine.

The Chinese government goes to great lengths to enforce its ban on internet pornography, claiming that the titillating media harms the physical and mental health of young people. From a censorship standpoint, however, China has the benefit of the Great Firewall to repel the porn-addled tubes of foreign nations more effectively.

But China was recently forced to retreat from a scheme to install so-called anti-pornography software on every computer sold in the country after the program was heavily criticized on several fronts. The country will now only require the software to be installed in schools, internet cafes, and other public places.

China goes about the ban by blocking results and occasionally publicly shaming its biggest search engines such as Baidu and Google China for the websites including links to pornographic material and other content found “vulgar” or “violating public morality.” In June, the Chinese government also announced it would recruit “internet supervisors” from the public who will be charged with reporting individuals and business accessing unsanctioned content from the web. ®

this article first appeared on the register

in sweden –
people who are pro-censorship
want “positive, understandable art”…

the easily bored audience rules…

incidents of violence are really the tip of the iceberg
which indicates the severe restrictions of the communal
which are deeply entrenched –
any writer who wants respect or money or awards
is operating under conditions of severe self censorship.

self censorship – all pervasive in hollywood and commercial theatre,
any standards of authenticity, relevance, ideals of truth and so on
have long ago left the building…

one might compare theatre which creates a product (i.e. Wilson) and then finds an audience / theatre with that which first susses out the audience and then gives them what they want…

Government goes from criticising Orelsan to defending him – after rapper is dropped from event in Socialist Ségolène Royal’s region

He is known as the French Eminem: a middle-class teacher’s son from a dull town in lower Normandy who raps about the rural drug epidemic, boredom and the hopelessness of French provincial teenagers.

But ever since the political class expressed outrage at a song from Orelsan’s back catalogue in which he once sang about grotesque violence against a girlfriend who cheated on him, the 26-year-old rap star has become the centre of a national debate over censorship.

The row escalated today as politicians from all political parties waded in to express disgust that Orelsan – real name Aurelien Contentin – had been dropped from the lineup of one of France’s most important summer music festivals, the Francofolies at La Rochelle.

Nicolas Sarkozy’s ruling centre-right UMP party, which earlier this year led criticism of Orelsan’s song, Sale Pute (Dirty Slut), has now issued a statement saying it was “intolerable” to censor an artist. The party rounded on the Socialist Ségolène Royal, head of the western region where the festival takes place, saying she was “attacking freedom of expression”.

Earlier this month, Royal told a local paper she was happy Orelsan’s appearance had been pulled and that she had written to the festival for “clarification” on his part in the lineup.

Jack Lang, the Socialist and former culture minister, warned of a culture of “moral censorship” in France. He said the move to axe Orelsan was symptomatic of broader attacks against freedom of expression by local councils of all political persuasions. Last month, Orelsan’s new album was pulled from all Paris’s municipal libraries, prompting the League for Human Rights to appeal to Paris’s Socialist head of culture to think again.

Orelsan today told French radio his removal from the Francofolies festival was “really abhorrent”. He stressed that he no longer sang Sale Pute on stage, having removed it from his website, and that those censoring him had not seen his act. He said he wanted a meeting with the new culture minister, Frédéric Mitterrand.

Several other French singers made statements in his support. One of them, Cali, said the festival had totally discredited itself. In a letter made public by Orelsan’s record company, Cali said: “There will be a before and an after Orelsan. For my part, I’ll boycott all these muzzled places – with sadness but conviction.”

this article first appeared on the guardian.co.uk

CUBAN dissidents have found a brave new figurehead in Yoani Sanchez, a blogger whose observations about life in one of the world’s last communist bastions have angered the state and made her a global celebrity.

Sanchez, a 33-year-old philologist, has attracted a loyal fan base with her gentle mockery of the regime in Havana, which seems to be at a loss over how to rein in “cyber-space rebels”.

“They regard me as an enemy of the state,” said Sanchez last week in a telephone interview. “That is because the blogging phenomenon has opened up a crack in government control which is almost impossible to repair.”

Although it is read all over the world, Sanchez’s blog, Generation Y, is blocked in Cuba. However, like Soviet-era homemade samizdat copies of censored books, it circulates on computer memory sticks and CDs as well as on paper.

“I know that I am being read because people recognise me in the street,” said Sanchez, who sometimes has had to pose as a Swiss tourist so as to be able to post her blog on the internet from a Havana hotel. “People come up to me all the time to wish me luck.”

The government of Raul Castro, 77-year-old brother of the retired Fidel, accuses her of being part of a “counter-revolutionary” conspiracy. Elsewhere she is regarded as a hero: Time magazine recently named her among the 100 most influential people in the world.

Last year Spain awarded her one of its most prestigious journalism prizes.

She was not allowed out of the country to collect it - nor to attend the party held yesterday in Italy for the publication of Cuba Libre, a collection of her blogs - but her prominent international profile protects her in a country where dissidents routinely end up in jail.

Besides being denied an exit visa, she has found her freedom to travel inside Cuba restricted. “We’re treated like schoolchildren: we need permission to go anywhere,” she said with a laugh. “I’ve been misbehaving so I’m not allowed.”

She believes that the election of President Barack Obama in the United States will put pressure on the government to allow more political openings. In the end, though, change will be imposed by the Cubans themselves, she predicted.

“People are waking up from a long cycle of silence,” she said, adding that technology such as digital video and the internet was making it much more difficult for the government to maintain its control.

“My philosophy,” said Sanchez, who is under constant surveillance by the state security apparatus, “is that if they watch me, I’ll watch them. I make videos of things all the time, which I put on the internet.”

Her blog last week featured a visit to one of Havana’s hotels by Sanchez and her husband. Sanchez filmed while he asked a receptionist if he could buy an hour’s internet access. The woman explained to him that new rules forbid Cubans from logging onto the internet from hotels.

Sanchez said this would not affect her blog, however. “We’re slippery people,” she laughed. “If they want to restrict us, we’ll always find other ways.”

Necessity has prompted extraordinary creativity among Cubans, she says, adding that homemade computers built from black-market parts have proliferated in recent years.

In a posting on Friday, she highlighted the case of an “alternative technician” friend who had bartered his watch for a microprocessor to make his computer.

He dreams of leaving the country and marrying a foreigner who would give hima new computer on his wedding day “to which he would not have to add any bolts”.

Other recent postings include film of Sanchez speaking out against censorship at an arts performance in Havana. She has also encouraged people to bang their pots and pans at night in protest. Film of these cacerolazos, as they are known, has appeared on the internet.

The government has branded her antics “a provocation against the Cuban revolution” but Sanchez puts a brave face on harassment by the state.

“They’re trying to make mea radioactive person,” she said. “But I don’t like the role of victim. I try to respond with a smile.”

As for the Castro “dynasty”, she believes that it has run out of steam. “The Cuban system is like one of those gravity-defying houses in Old Havana,” she said. “How does it stay up? Maybe one day they pull a small nail from the door and the house comes tumbling down. In today’s Cuba, that small nail could be anything.”

Perhaps it will be her.

this article originally published here

URGENT - VOTING IN EU PARLIAMENT 5th of MAY 2009
Don’t let the EU parliament lock up the Internet! There will be no way back!

Act now!
Internet access is not conditional

Everyone who owns a website has an interest in defending the free use of Internet… so has everyone who uses Google or Skype… everyone who expresses their opinions freely, does research of any kind, whether for personal health problems or academic study … everyone who shops online…who dates online…socialises online… listens to music…watches video…

Millions of Europeans now depend on the Internet, directly or indirectly, for their livelihood. Taking it away, chopping it up, ‘restricting it’, ‘limiting it’ and placing conditions on our use of it, will have a direct impact on people’s earnings. And in the current financial climate, that can’t be good.

The internet as we know it is at risk because of proposed new EU rules going through end of April. Under the proposed new rules, broadband providers will be legally able to limit the number of websites you can look
at, and to tell you whether or not you are allowed to use particular services. It will be dressed up as ‘new consumer options’ which people can choose from. People will be offered TV-like packages - with a limited
number of options for you to access.

It means that the Internet will be packaged up and your ability to access and to put up content could be severely restricted. It will create boxes of Internet accessibility, which don’t fit with the way we use it today. This is because internet is now permitting exchanges between persons which cannot be controlled or “facilitated” by any middlemen (the state or a corporation) and this possibility improves the citizen’s life but force the industry to lose power and control. that’s why they are pushing governments to act those changes.

The excuse is to control the flow of music, films and entertainment content against the alleged piracy by downloading for free, using P2P file-sharing. However, the real victims of this plan will be all Internet users and the democratic and independent access to information, culture goods.

Think about how you use the Internet! What would it mean to you if free access to the Internet was taken away?
These days, the Internet is about life and freedom. It’s about shopping, booking theatre tickets … holidays, learning, job-seeking, banking, and trade. It’s also about the fun things - dating, chatting, invitations, music, entertainment, joking and even a Second Life. It is a tool to express ourselves, to collaborate, innovate, share, stimulate new business ideas, reach new markets - thrive without middlemen..

Just think - what’s your web address? Unless people have that address in their “package” of regular websites - they won’t be able to find you. That means they can’t buy, or book, or register, or even view you online. Your business won’t be able to find niche suppliers of goods - and compare prices. If you get any money at all from advertising on your site, it will diminish. Yes, Amazon and a select few will be OK, they will be the included in the package. But your advertising on Google or any other website, will be increasingly worthless. Skype could be blocked. (As it is in Germany in the use from iPhone, already). Small businesses could literally disappear, especially specialist, niche or artisan businesses.

If we don’t do something now - we could lose free and open use of the internet. Our freedom (of choice in information, market, culture, pleasure) will be curtailed. The EU proposals hold an enormous risk for our future. They are about to become Law - and will be virtually impossible to reverse. People (even the members of the European Parliament who are voting on it) don’t really seem to understand the full implications and the legal changes are wrapped up in something called “Telecoms Package” which lulls people into thinking it is just about industry.

However, in reality, hiding from public view, the amendments are about the way the Internet will operate in future! Text that expresses your rights to access and distribute content, services and applications, is being crossed out. And the text that is being brought in, says that broadband providers must inform you of any limitations, or restrictions to your broadband service. Alternative versions use the word ‘conditions’ - and it is seriously being proposed that you will be told the conditions of use of Internet services. This is made to sound good - it is dressed up as ‘transparency’ - except that of course it means that the broadband providerwill have the legal right restrict your access or impose conditions,otherwise why would they need tell you? If the Telecoms Package amendmentsare voted in, the changes will not be reversible.

We all have a stake in the Internet! You need to act now to save it!
What can you do about it?
Tell the European Parliament to vote against conditional access to the Internet! Remind them that they need your vote in June and that internet still give us the tools to be watching and judging what they are doing! (link a la quadrature du net) You must know you are not alone: hundreds of organizations are working on that and thousands of people have already contact their parliamentarians about this issue.

more info here

Chris Roper

What fresh hell is this? We now live in a country where only racists are allowed to say the word kaffir. So, for example, if you happen to be black, and some racist idiot calls you kaffir, you have to say, “Hey! Don’t call me the k-word!”

People at the Broadcasting Complaints Commission, are you out of your tiny little minds? The BCCSA are fining radio station 5fm R10 000 for playing Arthur Mafokate’s famous 1995 kwaito hit Kaffir. This is like fining American hip hop legends Niggaz With Attitude (NWA), and making them change their name to N-Words With Attitude. Ooh, that’s a catchy name!

The Arthur song is a protest song (you needed them in 1995, and you still need them now), and it’s an important part of the history of the struggle against apartheid.

But the BCCSA, in the person of Professor Kobus van Rooyen, said: “The word represents one of the elements of apartheid which degraded a whole nation of black people. The broadcast of the song flies in the face of the constitutional founding values of dignity and equality.”

According to the Sunday Times, the BCCSA also ruled last year “that the song amounted to ‘grossly offensive language’ broadcast at a time when children were likely to be part of the audience”.

‘Educational opportunity’

So, to sum up - teaching children of South Africa that their parents fought to be able to tell racists not to insult them by calling them kaffirs, is bad for children. Let’s rather let them believe that their parents fought and died so that they could have equal access to BMWs. Let’s have them believe that a dompas is something the Stormers do, and that forced removals are what you do when you want to make space in your belly for more beer.

To her credit, “one of the BCCSA tribunal members, Tembeka Mdlulwa, believed the song could offer an educational opportunity for parents”. But naturally, she was outvoted, because a tribunal is invariably a many-headed creature with no guts. It won’t escape seasoned race fans

Am I saying that we should be able to use the word kaffir with equanimity? No. I’m saying that you shouldn’t write works of art out of history, especially works that are actually pro-human rights and -equality, and actually by the people who suffered injustice and oppression.

In an odd moment of syncretism, our music team at Channel24 have recently voted Arthur’s song in at number one on the list of Great South African Song Opening Lines. If you want to listen to the native song that’s causing all the trouble, go here - but don’t let your children click!

Of the opening lines “Baas, say ‘nee’, baas, don’t call me a kaffir,” Music editor Miles Keylock writes, “Is there a more righteous opening salvo in the entire history of recorded music?” Well, I don’t know if there is or isn’t, but I do know “White person formerly known as baas, say nee, White person formerly known as baas, don’t call me the K-word,” isn’t it. That’s going to go down well on kwaito dance floors.

Recolonising languages

Why not ban Brain Damage, by the late, great James Phillips’ band Corporal Punishment, which features the lyrics “He’s a supervisor, takes a lot of skill to be in charge of 40 kaffirs, that’s responsible / he doesn’t mind that he gets all the pay / Mr Arri Paulus says ‘they’re just baboons anyway’.”

A graphic musical portrait of life under apartheid by one of the great struggle rock bands, but one that the BCCSA would probably have us write out of history. Poor James Phillips, he might as well have chosen a musical career over fighting oppression. I don’t see the BCCSA stopping radio stations from playing Ag Pleez Daddy.

Personally, I wouldn’t want the language of alternative music in South Africa to adopt the word kaffir in the same way that American Hip Hip culture embraced the word nigga.

There are times in history where drastic action is needed to recolonise languages, and while that time is here for us, our power balance isn’t as out of kilter as America’s was at the birth of Hip Hop.

Russell Simmons, the Donald Trump of Hip Hop, as our music editor defines him, called last year for the eradication of the words “bitch”, “ho” and “nigger” (sic). Clearly, the Def Jam founder believes that the time has passed when black Americans need to reclaim nigga - they own it now, and are abusing it. He even made Nas change his album title from Nigga to, uh, Untitled.

Different kettle of fish

Arthur’s Kaffir is a different kettle of fish though, and you’ll notice that it’s mostly white pots that are calling that kettle black. It appears that only white people have objected to 5fm’s playing of the song.

I leave you to work out why that is. All I know is I want to be there when the BCCSA’s Kobus van Rooyen tells 50 cent that, in the future, he has to refer to himself as a “bad n-word”.

I’ll leave you with another lyric by James Phillips, from 1993’s Fun’s not over:

“Just when we thought it’s over, we found it’s only just begun / Just when we thought it’s over, we’re still dying like flies underneath the sun / It’s still going crazy just like it’s always done.’

Chris Roper blogs on www.chrisroper.co.za. Join my Facebook group, or follow me on Twitter @ChrisRoperZA.

this article first appeared here

Monica Laganparsad Published:Apr 19, 2009

Out of tune: When DJ Fresh played the song on 5FM it caused a storm, but not on black radio stations

Kwaito star: Arthur Mafokate’s 1995 anthem sold 150 000 copies despite being banned by some stations

‘The only people who actually complained about it, funnily enough, were white people, which suggests to me it was more white guilt than anything else’

Arthur Mafokate and DJ Fresh offer to pay up for ‘Kaffir’ song.

One of South Africa’s major kwaito hits, Kaffir, released 14 years ago and recently replayed on 5FM, has cost the station a R10000 fine, imposed by the broadcast watchdog.

But the DJ at the centre of the fuss has blamed the outcry on “white guilt”.

The Broadcasting Complaints Commission of South Africa (BCCSA) ruled this week that Arthur Mafokate’s controversial 1995 protest song has “no place” in a country where “political correctness and sensitivity need to be practised”.

The song, considered a classic, starts with the words: Kom hier, kaffer, kom hier! Hoekom het jy nie my kar skoongemaak nie. .. Bliksem! The reaction follows: Baas, don’t call me a kaffir…

The song goes on to say: I don’t come from the devil, don’t call me a kaffir, you won’t like it if I call you baboon.

Although it was an instant hit in post-apartheid South Africa — it sold more than 150000 copies and became a club sensation — it was banned by several radio stations.

Last November 5FM’s DJ Fresh outraged several listeners when he played the song on his drive time show’s daily segment known as Cheese of the Day. The week’s theme was kwaito.

The SABC, owners of 5FM, said in its appeal that there had been no malicious intent in playing the song. The hit, it claimed, is said to “have set a precedent for the post-apartheid generations’ struggle combining dance music with the new phenomenon of freedom of expression”.

The BCCSA ruled last year that the song amounted to “grossly offensive language” broadcast at a time when children were likely to be part of the audience.

One of the BCCSA tribunal members, Tembeka Mdlulwa, believed the song could offer an educational opportunity for parents. She was, however, outvoted and the appeal was dismissed on Thursday.

Yesterday Mafokate, known as the former king of kwaito, said the song was still relevant.

“I don’t think it was a fair judgment. I wouldn’t encourage radio stations not to play the song and if push comes to shove I will pay the R10000 on their (5FM’s) behalf.”

The singer said the song had been used to re-launch 5FM when its name was changed.

DJ Fresh said he stood by his decision and would meet Mafokate’s payment “halfway”.

“‘The only people who actually complained about it, funnily enough, were white people, which suggests to me that it was more white guilt than anything else.”

He said the song had been on the SABC’s playlist for 14 years, but had previously been played mainly on black stations. When he aired it, he said, many people had heard it for the first time and this may have caused the shock.

The BCCSA dismissed the appeal, saying negative stereotypes could lead to further divisions in society and evoke “deep-lying emotions reminiscent of apartheid”.

Chairman of the appeal tribunal Professor Kobus van Rooyen, said: “The word represents one of the elements of apartheid which degraded a whole nation of black people. The broadcast of the song flies in the face of the constitutional founding values of dignity and equality,” he said.

Complainant Russel Raubach said in a written statement to the BCCSA that the song was “inappropriate” and if a white DJ had played the song there would have been an outcry.

“It takes away the progress we have made in South Africa towards trying to eradicate racism and racist terminology, ” he wrote.

A second complainant, listed as C Coetzee, said “this type of rubbish” was demeaning to white South Africans. — laganparsadm@sundaytimes.co.za

# To read the full BCCSA ruling go to:www.thetimes.co.za

this article first published by the sunday times

A philosophy professor in Argentina, Horacio Potel, is facing criminal charges for maintaining a website devoted to translations of works by French philosopher Jacques Derrida. His alleged crime: copyright infringement. Here is Professor Potel’s sad story.

“I was fascinated at the unlimited possibilities offered by the internet for knowledge exchange”, explains Horacio Potel, a Professor of Philosophy at the Universidad Nacional de Lanu’s in Buenos Aires. In 1999, he set up a personal website to collect essays and other works of some well-known philosophers, starting with the German Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger. Potel’s websites - Nietzsche in Spanish, Heidegger in Spanish and Derrida in Spanish - eventually developed into growing online libraries of freely downloadable philosophical texts. Nietzsche in Spanish alone has already received more than four million visitors.

One of Potel’s best known websites, www.jacquesderrida.com.ar focused on his favourite French philosopher, Algerian-born Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), who was the founder of “deconstruction”. On this website Potel posted many of the philosopher’s works, translated into Spanish, as well as discussion forums, research results, biographies, images and the usual pieces of information typical of this type of online resource. “I wanted to share my love for philosophy with other people. The idea was disseminating the texts and giving them some sort of arrangement” declares Potel.

To Potel, what he was doing was what professors have done for centuries: helping students to get access to knowledge. “It is not possible to find the same comprehensive collection of works that was available at Derrida’s and Heidegger’s websites either in libraries or in bookstores in Argentina”, says Potel. In fact, only two bookstores in Argentina’s largest city, Buenos Aires, carry some books by Derrida and many of his works are seldom available to readers. Potel spent decades visiting libraries and bookstores to collect the material he posted on his online library. “Many of those texts are already out of print”, he says. Books that are out of print cannot be purchased, but they are often still protected by copyright laws.

Furthermore, Potel finds the prices charged by foreign publishers, such as the Mexican companies Porrua and Cal y Arena, “prohibitive” by Argentinean standards. He gives as an example the price of a recently published booklet of a conference given by Derrida. Printed in large typeface, the booklet has about eighty pages, although the text would certainly fit in twelve. It was being sold for 162 Argentinean pesos, around 42 US dollars at current exchange rates. Even at that steep price copies were very hard to find within two weeks after they arrived in Argentina. Potel relates how he had to walk around Buenos Aires for an entire afternoon in order to find a single copy of the booklet.

But the price of foreign books is not the only concern in this case. For Derrida’s works to be accessible to the Spanish-speaking world they have to be translated. While the Spanish versions of the texts available on the website were not done by him, Potel made corrections to a few of them, since some of Derrida’s Spanish language books have been quite poorly translated. To make the texts easier to understand for readers, Potel also linked each translation to the original text, as well as to other works cited by Derrida.

Eventually, Potel’s popular website caught the attention of a publisher. A criminal case against Potel was initiated on December 31, 2008 after a complaint was lodged by a French company, the publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit. They have published only one of Derrida’s books and it was in French. Minuit’s complaint was passed on to the French Embassy in Argentina and it became the basis of the Argentina Book Chamber’s legal action against Potel.

The Argentina Book Chamber boasts of its doubtful precedents of having been responsible for a police raid at the Faculty of Arts and Letters of the University of Buenos Aires and for having managed to condemn some professors for encouraging the students to photocopy books and articles. “The view of the police entering the Puán’s building is remembered with astonishment by many members of the academic community” says a report. The next possible effects of the legal action against Potel are the wiretapping of his phone line, the interception of his email accounts and an incursion into his house to “determine the actual place where the illegal act occurred”.

Potel has already removed all the content from his website, a decision which he regards as a tragedy. “These websites are my best work. They are the result of many hours of work and have been entirely funded by me”, he says. Those who access www.jacquesderrida.com.ar today
find a warning: “This website has been taken down due to a legal action initiated by the Argentina Book Chamber”. Potel insists that he “never intended to make a profit” out of Derrida’s works. Yet he faces a possible criminal sentence of one month up to six years in prison for violation of Argentina’s intellectual property laws, according to a February 28, 2009 story by the online version of Argentina’s largest newspaper, Clarín.

If Derrida was alive, he would probably be thanking Potel for bringing translations of his texts to millions of Spanish-speaking readers, who otherwise would never have had the opportunity to read the works of the French philosopher. Here’s what the founder of deconstruction said about freedom within the university:

“And yet I maintain that the idea of this space of the academic type has to be symbolically protected by a kind of absolute immunity, as if its interior were inviolable; I believe (this is like a profession of faith which I address to you and submit to your judgment) that this is an idea that we must reaffirm, declare, and profess endlessly. […] This freedom of immunity of the university and par excellence of its Humanities is something to which we must lay claim, while committing ourselves to it with all our might. Not only in a verbal and declaratory fashion, but in work, in act and in what we make happen with events.”

(Jacques Derrida, “The University Without Condition” in Without Alibi, ed. & trans. by Peggy Kamuf, Stanford University Press, 2002, p. 210)

Those who profess to “protect” Derrida’s “intellectual property rights” are now persecuting a professor who is simply following the French philosopher’s teachings and popularising them in the Spanish-speaking world.

The CopySouth Research Group calls on the Argentina Book Chamber and the government of Argentina to drop these criminal charges immediately and to respect and protect professor Potel’s academic freedom in providing popular access to philosophical works. In any conflict between intellectual property and the right to education and to access knowledge, we choose education and we urge those who share the same concerns to spread the word widely and rapidly.

You can send letters to Les Éditions de Minuit (7 Rue Bernard Palissy, 75006 Paris 06, France, email: contact@leseditionsdeminuit.frArgentina Book Chamber (Av. Belgrano 1580, Piso 4, C1093AAQ Buenos Aires, Argentina, email: cal@editores.org.ar and the Argentina Federal Council of Education (Pizzurno 935, P.B. of. 5, C1020ACA Buenos Aires, Argentina, email: cfce@me.gov.ar.

30 March 2009
The CopySouth Research Group
contact@copysouth.org

The CopySouth Research Group (CSRG) was established in 2005. The CSRG is composed of researchers and activists in more than 15 countries and conducts research on a range of copyright and related issues in the global South. Copies of the 210-page CopySouth Dossier are available as a free download (in English and Spanish) on its website (www.copysouth.org.

Note: This report is based on information collected from Horacio Potel and from several other sources, including the article on the online version of the Argentinean newspaper Clarín, a blog post by Patricio Lorente translated by Carolina Botero and a Wikipedia entry on Horacio Potel.

this article first appeared here

Linking to flagged sites will cost you

The Australian communications regulator has issued a stark warning that websites who link out to ‘banned’ hyperlinks are liable to fine of up to Aus $11,000 a day.

The news comes after web forum Whirlpool was threatened with the fine for posting a hyperlink to a blacklisted anti-abortion website.

Wikileaks blacklisted

One of the newest additions to Australia’s ‘blacklisted hyperlinks’ list is Wikileaks; the website that publishes anonymous submissions of sensitive info on everything from corporations, religion and governments.

The blacklisting of certain pages of the site has come about after Wikileaks posted a list of websites at the tail end of 2008 that comprised the ’secret internet censorship’ list for Denmark. On this list were over 3,500 sites that were censored or banned in the country.

Disturbing picture

While Australia’s list of blacklisted sites currently stands at 1,370, the Sydney Morning Herald is reporting that that list could increase to around 10,000 sites – most of which are of illegal pornographic content, but could also includes sites that house incendiary political discussions.

“The Government is embarking on a deeply unpopular and troubling experiment to fine-tune its ability to censor the internet,” said communications spokesman Senator Scott Ludlam of Australian opposition party Greens.

“If you consider this kind of net censorship in the context of Australia’s anti-terror laws, it paints a disturbing picture indeed.”

On its website, Wikileaks, which leaked the news that the government had banned it for leaking information, simply said: “The first rule of censorship is that you cannot talk about censorship.”

Currently, it is not illegal for internet users in Australia to click on the sites found on the web blacklist. The people targeted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (ACMA) are webmasters linking out to the sites that the government have flagged up as inappropriate.

This could all change, however, if a mandatory internet filtering censorship scheme is implemented – something that is being debated at the moment.

Via Sydney Morning Herald

first published on techradar.com

Written by Ernesto on February 23, 2009

Throughout Europe, music industry lobbyists have tried to convince ISPs to block file-sharing sites, and not without success. The Irish ISP Eircom is the first to cave in to the pressure of the music industry, and without any argument will block all file-sharing related websites - starting with The Pirate Bay.

Last month, Eircom announced that at the behest of the music industry it will disconnect customers who are allegedly sharing copyrighted material. Initially the ISP planned to stand up for its customers in court. However, it didn’t have the courage of its convictions and the case was aborted. Capitulating to the music industry’s demands, Eircom agreed to start disconnecting those accused of illicit file-sharing.

But that wasn’t enough. Now the industry wants more and is ordering Eircom to block access to any sites it wants blocked. And it doesn’t end there.

Smelling blood, the music industry is ratcheting up the pressure and they are now demanding that all ISPs censor the Internet by blocking access to all file-sharing related websites (more info and the full letter here).

And the worrying news is it’s already a partially done deal. The Irish Recorded Music Association (IRMA) has already convinced Eircom to comply, and is warning the other Internet providers in Ireland that they should follow suit, or face legal action.

The first and primary target is The Pirate Bay. This comes as no surprise of course, as the music industry’s IFPI has already succeeded in blocking the largest BitTorrent tracker in Denmark, after which they attempted to do the same in Norway and Italy. In Italy the Internet providers initially complied, but this decision was later overturned in court.

As for the next targets for censorship - for which a list is currently being drawn up by Irma - this is how the industry’s scheme will work. Under the terms of an agreement between Eircom and Irma, Eircom will not oppose any court application, meaning that orders requesting the blockage of a particular website will be automatically granted. A spokesman for Eircom confirmed that Eircom ‘‘will not oppose any application [Irma] may make seeking the blocking of access from their network’’ to ‘blacklisted’ websites.

The other Irish ISPs are now facing legal action from the music industry if they don’t give in to IRMA’s demands within seven days. The ISPs are baffled by the aggressive approach by the music industry, and are calling for protection to prevent worse.

“We don’t support illegal activity on our network but this is an unprecedented agreement,” said Alex French of Ireland’s leading Wi-Fi service Bitbuzz. “Is the music industry planning to become Ireland’s de facto internet censor?”

So it seems. However, Eircom could be digging an even deeper hole for itself. By agreeing to censor the Internet at the behest of not the police, but a private and commercially driven organization, it has effectively dumped its own common carrier protection.

Furthermore, The Pirate Bay (or any other sites Ericom intend to block) have never been deemed illegal in Ireland. This has to be seen as a very worrying development. So, open the floodgates, everyone is going to want sites blocked soon and if you’ve got enough cash, it’s on the cards with Eircom. At the very least, let’s hope Eircom is going to make its list of banned sites public, along with their reasons for blocking each and every site, properly referenced under the law.

And let’s hope the rest of Ireland’s ISPs stand up for themselves.

this article first published on torrentfreak.com

Special correspondent Oscar Swartz reports.

STOCKHOLM — Defendant Fredrik Neij took the stand as the landmark trial of Pirate Bay continued Thursday, and left the prosecutor scratching his head over who is in charge of the BitTorrent site.

Three young computer geeks and one businessman face civil and criminal charges here for alleged contributory copyright infringement. The three geeks — Fredrik Neij, Gottfrid Svartholm Warg and Peter Sunde — are often referred to as “the good, the bad and the ugly.” Neij is the bad one: a tech whiz with unpaid parking tickets and tax debts, who overslept Sunday’s Pirate Bay press conference.

Fredrik Neij (left) together with Tobias Andersson, an ideologue from the Pirate Bureau.
Photo: Oscar Swartz

Clad in a brown T-shirt with golden print, Neij appeared awkward in court as he struggled to explain the community nature of Pirate Bay to a prosecutor who seemed unfamiliar with non-hierarchical organization.

The prosecutor became visibly frustrated when he tried to get Neij to identify the kingpin who is ultimately responsible for Pirate Bay and the text and graphics on the site. Neij explained that an extended group of people have privileges on the server, and contribute haphazardly as they see fit. The prosecutor seemed not to grasp the concept.

“But someone must ultimately decide whether to put up a certain text or graphic,” he protested.

“No,” Neij answered. “Why? If someone believes a new text is needed, he just inputs it. Or if a graphic is ugly, someone makes a better one. The one who wants to do something just does it.”

Neij also shared how he got involved in Pirate Bay. Years ago, he innocently offered server space to a friend, Gottfrid, who was looking for someplace to host his fledgling BitTorrent tracker. Before he knew it, Neij testified, he was at the center of a growing project started by Swedish open-culture activists who are known as the Pirate Bureau.

As the website’s popularity swelled, Neij willingly devoted himself to building up an infrastructure that could meet the demand.

“There is no other place I could face these technical challenges except large firms where I would be top-ridden by bosses,” Neij explained.

When the prosecutor was finished with Neij, recording-industry lawyer Peter Danowsky confronted the geek with an inflammatory speech he delivered outside the Swedish parliament three days after the raid on Pirate Bay, while Swedish youth were in uproar over the action.

Danowsky said the speech proved Neij’s lawless intent. Neij countered that he is only a technician. He said he read that ideological screed at the request of the Pirate Bureau.

Authorship of that speech is generally credited to the well-versed ideologue Tobias Andersson from the Pirate Bureau. In fact, Andersson sat in the courtroom Thursday, but was asked to leave because he’s slated to be called as a witness later in the case.

“Can I listen to the proceedings on radio?” Andersson asked as he was shown the door. He was referring to the live webcasts from the court.

“Well,” said one of the judges. “We cannot stop you, can we?”

this article first appeared on wired.com

4:00AM Wednesday Feb 18, 2009
Meera Selva

Photographers show their annoyance. Photo / AP

LONDON - Tourists better think twice now before snapping pictures of the iconic British bobby.

A new anti-terrorism law went into effect yesterday that could effectively bar photographers from taking pictures of police or military personnel - a move that prompted some 200 photographers to protest outside of Scotland Yard headquarters.

Although the measure aims to prevent terrorists from taking reconnaissance shots, photographers say it could be misused at a whim to stop any pictures from being taken - especially images involving police abuse and demonstrations.

Freelancer Jess Hurd said she was stopped by police when photographing a wedding of Irish travellers. Part of the story was about how the travellers - who often roam from site to site - face harassment from police.

“The police stopped me and ordered me to stop filming them, saying I could be carrying out hostile reconnaissance,” Hurd said.

“I had no idea what they were talking about until I realised we were vaguely in the vicinity of City Airport.”

Advertisement
Advertisement

The new act makes it a crime to “elicit, publish or communicate information” about British police or military personnel.

Britain’s Home Office said that the law was designed to protect police officers on counterterrorism operations. In many cases, officers could allow photographers to keep taking pictures. In other cases, they could ask them to stop or threaten them with arrest.

Ignoring a warning could result in arrest, up to 10 years in prison or unspecified fines.

Neil Turner, of the British Press Photographers Association, said the industry had a code of conduct setting out rights and obligations on both sides. But he said the message was often not passed on to junior officers.

this article first appeared here

By Kim Zetter

Privacy advocates say prosecutors are misusing child pornography laws by turning them against the very people they are meant to protect.

The accusation comes following a raft of recent child pornography cases against juveniles accused of photographing themselves in the nude.

This week, prosecutors in Greensburg, Pennsylvania charged six teens ranging in age from 14 to 17 with creating, distributing and possessing child pornography, after three girls were found to have taken photos of themselves in the nude or partially nude and e-mailed them to friends, including three boys who are among the defendants.

The case is only one of the latest in a spate of similar prosecutions and investigations. In Florida, officials similarly charged a 16-year-old girl and her 17-year-old boyfriend with producing, directing or promoting child porn after they photographed themselves having sex. Neither of the teens shared the images with anyone else.

The issue of teenagers distributing self-made pornography isn’t new, but its prevalence and consequences have been exacerbated by advances in technology. Thirty years ago a teen who wanted to take nude self-portraits had to develop the film at a lab, and distribution was limited by the number of copies made from the negative. Now a camera-phone and internet connection are enough to send the image around the world in an instant, whether or not the sender intended it to reach that far.

Critics say the criminal charges against minors, under laws that were meant to protect them from adults, is the wrong way to address the issue of teens exploring their sexuality. Law enforcement’s reaction effectively turns victims into perpetrators, they say.

“The problem is that the child porn laws were really designed for a situation where an adult abuses a minor by forcing that minor … psychologically as well as physically … into taking these pictures,” said Mark Rasch, a former federal cybercrime prosecutor. “But when the person takes the picture herself or consents to the picture being taken, it turns the whole statute on its head.”

In the Pennsylvania case, a school official seized the phone of one of the boys after he was caught using it during school hours in violation of a school rule, according to local police Capt. George Seranko. The official found the picture on the phone, and after some interrogation, discovered that two other girls had also e-mailed photos of themselves in the nude to friends. That’s when the school called police, who obtained search warrants to seize the phones and examine them. Police showed the images to the local district attorney, who recommended they bring charges.

Seranko said the images “weren’t just breasts; they showed female anatomy.”

Authorities argue that bringing child porn charges against teens is designed to educate them about the dangers of creating and distributing such images, which could fall into the hands of commercial pornographers, pedophiles or others who might want to harm or exploit them.

But Parry Aftab, founder and director of WiredSafety, which educates kids about internet safety, says the prosecutions are desperate acts by frustrated law enforcement officials, and they don’t achieve the desired effect.

“Prosecutors don’t know what to do, so they are reaching out in the way that prosecutors do,” she said.

Rasch agrees. “You take teenagers, alcohol and cell phone cameras and put them in a room together and you’ve got a prescription for disaster,” he said. “But you shouldn’t be making felons out of it.”

Rasch supports legislation to exempt any minor from prosecution for creating an image of himself or herself and distributing it to friends. The recipient, too, should be exempt, though Rasch sees no problem with charging a boyfriend or friend if they distribute the image further without the girl’s consent. Even then, though, he thinks there’s room for debate about the consequences.

“If my son or daughter were doing this kind of stuff, I’d have a serious discussion with them about the consequences, but I don’t know that it would help anybody to throw them in jail,” he said.

Rasch said teens don’t realize that one unintentional consequence of self-made child porn is that it can sometimes provide authorities with evidence of other crimes. He cites the case of Genarlow Wilson in Georgia who was convicted of having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl when he was 17 based on a videotape of his encounter with the girl at a party. Wilson was sentenced to 10 years in prison and required to register as a sex offender, though he was released after serving two years following an appeal to the state supreme court.

There are no known cases involving federal charges against a minor for child porn: the recent cases were brought under state laws by local prosecutors, usually in juvenile court. Since juvenile cases are not part of the public record, Rasch says it’s not known what kinds of sentences have resulted from such cases. But he said generally juveniles who commit crimes get convicted of delinquency, not the actual crime they commit.

In the recent Pennsylvania case, Capt. Seranko said the teens are likely to get community service if convicted.

“Their records won’t be scarred for life,” he said.

Rasch points out that people who take or share nude self-portraits when they’re minors could be prosecuted as adults and face harsher penalties if they’re still in possession of the images when they reach the age of 18.

With regard to the claim that prosecution of minors will deter other teens from engaging in the same activity, Aftab says this isn’t the case, because teens don’t identify with the concept of criminal charges. She points to the famous case of several teenage girls in Florida last year who were arrested for beating up another girl.

“They were laughing on the way to jail and worrying about if their hair will look good on camera,” said Aftab. “They didn’t understand that jail is jail.”

In the case of teens charged with child pornography, they simply don’t see a difference between posting provocative pictures on MySpace and sending nude photos to friends.

“These kids are now seeing stuff on MySpace and other places online where other kids are posing in sexual poses in the nude performing real or mock sex, and to them it’s just their 15 megabytes of fame. They think it’s the norm,” she said.

Aftab says the solution is counseling and education. The former should enlist mental health experts, and the latter should involve teen educators, since teens don’t listen to adults when it comes to regulating their behavior.

She also said teens who engage in this kind of activity should be punished with a consequence that really matters — having their cell phone taken away or losing internet or other privileges.

“That’s real,” Aftab said. “It’s quantifiable and it’s within their reach.”

this article first published on wired.com