Month: June 2009

Free speech, old laws, and vibrating objects

(Warning: linked pages contain profanity and obscene gestures. If you are easily offended by adult topic matter, you may wish to skip this post.)

AlterNet recently published an excerpt from a book entitled In Praise of Indecency, entitled “You Still Can’t Buy a Vibrator in Alabama.” The excerpt is a very candid–almost too candid–look at obscenity in the media.

Of particular note is this incident:

In March 2007, on International Women’s Day, a public high school in Westchester, New York suspended three 16-year-old girls for saying the word “vagina” during a reading from The Vagina Monologues. Principal Richard Leprine said the girls were punished for disobeying orders not to say the word, which he referred to on the school’s homepage as “specified material.” Writer Brigitte Schoen suggested calling the play Elastic Muscular Tube Monologues.

I honestly think this goes a bit too far. “Vagina” is, after all, a medical term. It is one thing to discipline kids for gratuitous use of street terms for private parts; it is another entirely to censor the proper, medical term. Heck, Elliott in E.T. uttered the very-famous “penis breath” line and the movie was still rated PG, and probably airs intact on TV.

And, of course, the part for which the excerpt is named:

Which brings us to Sherri Williams, a casualty of the war on pleasure. She was acquitted of the heinous crime of selling non-prescription vibrators. She had violated an Alabama statute, which bans the sale of vibrators and other sex toys. The law prohibited “any device designed or marketed as useful primarily for the stimulation of human genital organs.”

But the not-guilty verdict in her case was overturned by a 2-1 decision. In the Court of Appeals, the state’s attorney general defended the statute, arguing that, “a ban on the sale of sexual devices and related orgasm-stimulating paraphernalia is rationally related to a legitimate interest in discouraging prurient interests in autonomous sex.” Rationally related? Moreover, he said, “There is no constitutional right to purchase a product to use in pursuit of having an orgasm.” There isn’t?

I think Texas still has a similar law on the books; why, I don’t know. Such is the nature of laws; once passed, they tend to stick around until legislators find time to repeal them. I think these laws, if they ever served a legitimate purpose (big if), do not serve a purpose today. As stated later in the article, Sherri is not giving up, and plans another lawsuit on First Amendment free speech grounds. Which is pretty daring, given some of the past case law on the First Amendment versus pornography.

But I cannot honestly blame Sherri for continuing to fight the good fight. The article ends with this stirringly defiant quote from Sherri, which is great inspiration to us all:

“My motto,” she says, “has been they are going to have to pry this vibrator from my cold, dead hand. I refuse to give up.”

The plight of Numerama and the future of copyright

Torrentfreak reports on a story involving the French P2P news site Numerama and the French courts. The courts have ordered Numerama to publish extracts of convictions of 27 copyright violators.

Although the court is compensating Numerama to the tune of €10,000 (about US$14,000), it is not surprising that Numerana is a bit worried about taking money from the pro-copyright lobby, even if it is indirectly. Some creative uses for the money have been proposed, and they run the gamut from buying servers for a file-sharing network to a donation to the (unfortunately named) Swedish Pirate Party.

This order comes even though Numerama is not involved in any of the cases. Such appears to be the quirkiness of French law. I question the wisdom of the move, and would still question it even if I believed the draconian copyright enforcement we face today is justified (which I don’t). For one, Numerama’s readers will probably see these people as martyrs or even heroes. With this in mind it is not clear at all just what the copyright holders, through their trade organizations, intend to accomplish.

We live in an age where the previous scarcity of recorded media no longer exists because of the advance of technology. Records, tapes, even CDs in the early years cost what they did because it was expensive and difficult to make copies. Now, all one has to do to make a copy is frequently no more than dragging icons from one window to another, or even typing in a command like cp -a music /media/travel5. That’s still a lot easier and faster than hooking up a tape deck to a record player ever was.

What has been the response of trade organizations like the MPAA and RIAA? Higher prices, and vicious attempts to restrict the freedom of the users. Everything is bits, and bits can be copied over and over again with no loss of quality; rather than embrace this, the companies which make up the MPAA and RIAA have tried to layer scarcity on top of it via Digital Restrictions Management (DRM). This is doomed to failure (already, the RIAA has admitted this by allowing Apple and Amazon to sell MP3 files without DRM).

Let’s define what copying, recording, and playback are, fundamentally (this is really as simple as it gets):

  • Copying is reading bits from a storage device (CD, DVD, hard drive, SD card) and writing the same bits again to another storage device.
  • Recording is reading bits from an input device (camera or microphone) and writing those bits to a storage device.
  • Playback is reading bits from a storage device and writing those same bits to an output device (video monitor or speakers).

All three are fundamentally the same operation. The only differences are where the bits come from and where they go.

The RIAA (and similar music/audio recording trade organizations) may finally be realizing this; when will the MPAA and television producers follow suit?

Bad cop: officer wrote something he shouldn’t on ticket

A 17-year old New Zealender who got a ticket for unauthorized passengers that could cost her NZ$400–but the profane insult that came with it is free.

Stuff.co.nz has the original report (warning: profanity) on the experience of Taliah Butters who claims she told the officer she was a “kitchen hand and part-time chef.” The cop, however, wrote a profane and insulting version on the ticket–think a nastier version of “kitchen dog.”

My take? As the bumper sticker says: “Bad cop–no donut.”

China gives Google the boot

The Financial Times reports on China’s latest censorship move: telling Google to shutdown its google.cn site for Chinese residents.

With the rise of technologies like Tor, Freenet, GNUnet, Mixmaster, and OpenPGP (including GNU Privacy Guard), censorship as a whole is unsustainable in the personal computing realm.

China is trying to hang onto a fasicst-communist regime similar to the USSR’s. The USSR broke up 20 years ago. How dumb can you be to not know this, unless you are intentionally ignoring all references to it?

Censorship, the way China is doing it, is doomed, and in fact, has already been circumvented. As John Gilmore said: “The Net interpets censorship as damage and routes around it.”

The Internet is about a lot more than the physical wires and the computers across the world. The Internet is about the people that use it. The Internet is about freedom of speech. More importantly, not just free speech for those in Western countries, not just free speech in the US where we damn near take the First Amendment right of free speech for granted–the Internet is about free speech everywhere.

The sooner they figure that out in China, the better.

Rescuing the unpublishable

Sometimes, I have to stand back and just admire a writer’s creativity. A recent article in Boston.com’s romance section could well be the pinnacle of Meredith Goldstein’s writing career in the creativity department. Meredith took an otherwise unpublishable letter and turned it into something which has, so far, received 344 comments (and will probably top 400 by the time it’s all done).

I’m trying to keep this blog at least PG-13-rated, so kids, if you can’t figure it out, you’re on your own.