Jesus and Mo respond to the recent and ongoing shenanigans in London.
Browsing Posts in Censorship
But even if some people are offended, offence is not a sufficient reason for certain artistic and satirical forms of expression to be prohibited. A university should hold no idea sacred and be open to the critiquing of all ideas and ideologies.
- The London School of Economics Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society, as quoted by New Humanist, responding to demands by the LSE student union that they remove a Jesus & Mo cartoon from their Facebook page.
I was going to post some expanded thoughts on this, but it turns out that the National Secular Society has said it so much better: LSE Students Union “being manipulated by determined activists” over Mohammed cartoon
Now is probably a good time to mention that a demonstration in defence of free expression, prompted by the student controversies and organised One Law For All, is set to take place in London on 11 February.
Rhys Morgan is an intelligent and articulate teenager and someone who impressed many with his work in publicising Stanislaw Burzynski‘s fradulent alternative medicine practices. Last week the University College London Atheist, Secularist and Humanist Society were told that they should remove an image, taken from the cover of a Jesus and Mo book, from their Facebook page for their weekly pub meet.
Rhys, along with many others, used the same image on his Facebook page in a show of solidarity for their cause. He left the picture up for about a week, then changed it back and went on with his life.
Until today. Someone who is a Muslim discovered the picture and found it offensive. He politely requested I remove the image -
“… just a kind request to either hide it or completely delete the picture…”
- a request I declined because I do not follow Islamic scripture or rules.
At this point, all hell broke loose and he found himself on the receiving end of a stream of threats and abuse. Then his school stepped in… and threatened to expel him.
So here’s the picture in question:
And I think the head at Rhys’s sixth form college should sit down and think long and hard about why he is so keen to side with a bunch of bullies.
And, for the last word on SOPA, here’s a copyright infringing YouTube video that I found via Nina Paley.
The Day the LOLcats died
The supporters of SOPA, and it’s Senate sister, PIPA claim that it will protect content industries. Tim O’Reilly very effectively takes this argument apart.
At O’Reilly, we have published ebooks DRM-free for the better part of two decades. We’ve watched the growth of this market from its halting early stages to its robust growth today. More than half of our ebook sales now come from overseas, in markets we were completely unable to serve in print. While our books appear widely on unauthorized download sites, our legitimate sales are exploding. The greatest force in reporting unauthorized copies to us is our customers, who value what we do and want us to succeed. Yes, there is piracy, but our embrace of the internet’s unparalleled ability to reach new customers “though it may not be perfect still secures to authors more money than any other system that can be devised.”
These bills are designed to protect companies that are unable – or unwilling – to respond to current market demands. Any law that tries to protect unrealistic business models is, inherently, a bad law.
I am aware that SOPA has been shelved. But being shelved is not the same as being killed. And PIPA is still working its way through the Senate legislative process.
I said yesterday that this site is going dark on Wednesday, as is Pulpmovies, in support of the Stop SOPA campaign. This is still going to happen.
Update
It turns out that SOPA has just been unshelved.
On January 18th, between 08:00 and 20:00 UTC, this little corner of the internet will be joining Identi.ca, Boing Boing, Rasberry Pi, and many others in an internet blackout in protest of the Stop Online Privacy Act proposed in the US Congress and its corresponding Senate bill, Protect IP.
This is a badly drafted bill, promoted by people who don’t understand its impact for the benefit of people who don’t care about your freedoms. It is so widely cast and so badly worded that it will limit what you can say online, regardless of whether you are in the US or not.
You can find more information on the SOPA/PIPA bills, and how they affect you whether or not you live in the USA, at americancensorship.org. And I hope that if you run any sort of Web service or publishing platform, you will join this blackout.
If you read any of the tech press, or spend any time around the nerdier corners of the internet, you will be aware something very bad is currently going through the US legislative process.
If you are not worried about SOPA, which is currently going through Congress, or its Senate sister, PIPA, I urge you to watch the video (from Fight for the Future by way of the WordPress Development blog) below.
I touched on this yesterday but it is worth reiterating. SOPA is a badly drafted law, promoted by people who don’t understand its impact for the benefit of people who don’t care about your freedoms. It is so widely cast and so badly worded that it will limit what you can say online, regardless of whether you are in the US or not – the videos example of Facebook having to censor its users posts is a good one.
If you are a US citizen, make your voice heard. If you are not a US citizen, encourage your American friends to make their voices heard.
If passed, this law will affect all of us.
Last month, Cory Doctorow gave a keynote speech to the Chaos Computer Congress. It turned up online but I have to admit to not having watched it as yet. Handily, though, the text of the speech has been posted on Boing Boing and he makes a strong case.
The TL;DR version is that legislators keep on reaching for regulation that won’t work to solve problems they don’t understand. This is happening now with copyright (the US SOPA legislation being the currently most obvious example), but will continue to happen – and probably increasingly so – as technology progresses.
If we want to be able to own and trust our devices – from the MP3 players we listen to to the cars we drive – the instinct to regulate needs to be stopped. Now.
So Benneton launched another poster campaign, one which depicted political and religious leaders kissing under the slogan Unhate. One of these posters showed Pope Benedict kissing Egypt’s Ahmed el Tayyeb, imam of the al-Azhar mosque in Cairo and the Vatican threw a tantrum. So Benneton pulled that particular poster.
All’s fair in love and commerce, I suppose, so this should have been the end of the story. But it isn’t, because the Vatican continued to throw a tantrum.
A statement said the Vatican had told its lawyers in Italy and around the world to “take the proper legal measures” to stop the use of the photo, even in the media.
Emphasis mine and, in deference to the Streisand effect, here is the poster:
I will resist the temptation to suggest that the reason the Vatican finds this poster so objectionable is that the imam is too old to appeal to the Pope.
Chaos feared after Unix time-zone database is nuked
The internet’s authoritative source for time-zone data has been shut down after the volunteer programmer who maintained it was sued for copyright infringement by a maker of astrology software.
Yes, you did read that right. A useful resource, provided free-of-charge by an altruistic programmer has just been shut down by an astrologer.
Words fail me.
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