PayPal Bans PayPorn!

Tomorrow what we can read, watch and the art we observe may not be decided by ourselves or governments and laws but by a new breed of censors. These censors may have no qualification or experience, just the ability to switch off those who they deem unfit. It’s like a McCarthy witch hut without the senate hearings, flag beating and just a darkened room and anonymous censor.

The latest technology censor has deemed erotica and pornography the evil and corrupting element that must not pass their doors. PayPal doesn’t even host any content it merely facilitates online payments. Yes, a financial service operator is now deciding what is appropriate to read and what isn’t. It can achieve this level of moral censorship by having a virtual monopoly over the business of controlling cash transfers made via the internet and also having a dominant market share over the online self-publishing channel.

Last week, without warning, PayPal merely wrote to every major self-publishing website and announced that it would refuse to process payments for clients that sell books which contain what it regards as "obscene" content. Paypal will aggressively prohibit erotic literature which contains scenes of bestiality, rape, incest and under-age sex. Ebook websites that sell such works will have their PayPal accounts deactivated. PayPal claim that they are acting under pressure from credit card companies (the likes of Visa, MasterCard, American Express, etc). This alone begs the question of hypocrisy and double standards as these companies are happy to take money from all sorts of services that are far more corrupting than erotic literature. PayPal is also owned by EBay who happily sell erotica and therefore its one rule for them and another for its customers.

It doesn’t matter how many books are effected it is the stupidity of a censorship based on subjective and unqualified self judgement in an area that they are ill qualified to judge. Will their ban apply to physical books, art , movies, music and will they come down heavy handed on all publishers or merely the self publishing market. More ridiculous is the question of how PayPal believes it is going to enforce its moral high ground. Will they ban any site from selling Nabacov, DH Lawrence, Stig Larson, Shakespeare, Suskind, Belle de Jour, Cleland, Harris, Neret, Zola, Joyce, Nin, Miller, Reage, Swinburne, Boccaccio Etc. Many artists and photographers,such as Mapplethgorpe, Newton and many more, would fall foul of these rules. After all it is ridiculous to effective ban one form of expression, literature without impacting other forms such as art, film, photography etc.

So PayPal and others have draw the line on their own definition of obscene adult content that it believes is extreme or potentially illegal. What comes next, political expression?

Advocacy groups are considering taking on the PayPal censorship case and some have already written on the subject; Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), and The American Booksellers Foundation for Free Expression (ABFFE) and the National Coalition Against Censorship (NCAC).

Perhaps someone at PayPal should enter the word 'erotica' on the parent EBay's own site!

2000 Years of Art but Apple Knows Best - Update

Perhaps sense does prevail in Appleworld after all. We wrote previously about Apple censorship of comic nudity in a new rendition of James Joyce's Ulysses and pointed out that Apple’s obsessive control of content could mean that art as we have known it over the centuries would be banned from the iPad. It was ironic that last night we watch a programme on the Italian Renaissance and the works of the likes of Michelangelo and wondered what those censors would make of these paintings, or for that matter the horrors of other works such as Goya.

Today marks the worldwide celebration of all things Joyce and Ulysses and as if on queue, AppleWorld censors have decided to allow the nude pictures in Throwaway Horse's graphic novel version of the book. The Apple folk had obviously seen the day in the diaries and realised it was a good day to turn a PR nightmare into a quick or quiet win.

The publisher is widely quoted that they have been told by Apple "that they made a mistake in establishing guidelines that were too rigid to allow for artistic growth". "We made a mistake," Apple spokeswoman Trudy Muller told the Washington Post, adding that when the comic's art was brought to Apple's attention, it "called the developers and offered them the opportunity to resubmit". "[Ulysses is] now in the store with the original panel drawings," she said.

The Ulysses chapter may now be closed but the questions still remain as to what the censor accepts as acceptable and fit for iPad consumption. The rigid control by geeks reading scripted rules begs the question of how many more times Apple’s rules will be tested before common sense prevails and the effort is redirected to more productive activity.

2000 Years of Art but Apple Knows Best

Steve Jobs is getting a track record for hypocrisy. In 2008, on commenting on the Kindle he said, "It doesn't matter how good or bad the product is, the fact is that people don't read anymore... The whole concept is flawed at the top because people don't read anymore.” Yesterday he claimed that Apple lives at the intersection of Technology and the Liberal Arts.

Everyone knows that James Joyce's Ulysses is a classic novel, one of the most important works of 20th centenary literature. Any rendition of the work will contain explicit language and scenes. These put the book in 1932 in the US dock and it won that famous court case. In 1933 United States v. One Book Called Ulysses, U.S. District Judge John M. Woolsey ruled that the book was not pornographic and therefore could not be obscene. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirming the ruling in 1934. However, outside of any court it has fallen foul of those ‘big brother’ censors who control Appleworld and a comic book adaptation of the classic has been rejected by Apple for containing cartoon nudity!

Would these same ‘McCathy’ or Mary Whithouse censors remove great swathes of art from antiquity to today on the same grounds? Would great cartoonists and illustrators such as Rowlinson, Gillray, Crumb would be banned? Would the majority of the photography of the likes of Breton, Newton, Bressai, Sieff, Weston and of course Mapplethrope ever make the cut? How will these consors deal with the many films have nudity in them.

Apple’s strict guidelines and a rating system is geared to prevent ‘adult’ content, but appear to only see black and white and clothed or unclothed and ban nudity irrespective of age!

So as the illustrators pixel over the bits Apple deems to rude to be seen, one questions whether they have gone too far and in whose interest they are acting? Perhaps Disney has a say perhaps not? The stupidity of Appleworld is that you can see the cleansed version in its purist form on the iPad and go to the website to see the uncensored rendition.

Will we black penned out words in the text of books or will a significant volume of written work be rejected? Will we have to those censor bleeps on music tracks?
Rated 17+ by Apple, Ulysses Seen is currently only available behind the censor’s cuts on the U.S. iTunes Store.

Some would say that the real shame is that Apple makes great products and bad moral judgement. Perhaps Applespeak is double entendre for Orwell's 'Doublespeak'.

Source Macworld