Censorship in America!

Posted Jan 16, 2009 18:12 UTC (Fri) by salimma (subscriber, #34460)
In reply to: Censorship in America! by ncm
Parent article: EFF Kicks Off Campaign to Free Your Phone

Even without the existence of DMCA, it is still censorship for Apple to act as gatekeeper, only allowing approved applications into the Apple Store. A similar analogy is with gaming consoles only running signed applications, putting the console makers in a similar gateway role.

Contrast this with the Android-based T-mobile G1, which, while by default only allowing vetted applications from the Android Market, allows users to turn off verification so that arbitrary applications can be loaded. Likewise, Windows allows non-signed drivers (but warns you about it).

DMCA makes it worse by making attempts to bypass the censorship criminal. It does not, by itself, mark the boundary between what is censorship and what is not.

Censorship in America!

Posted Jan 16, 2009 19:51 UTC (Fri) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

No. Censorship is a government activity. It's the DMCA that gets government involved, so it's the DMCA that makes it qualify as censorship. Without the DMCA, anybody would be allowed to (try to) reverse-engineer the iPhone interfaces, with no threat of prosecution.

Censorship in America!

Posted Jan 17, 2009 2:12 UTC (Sat) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link] (1 responses)

I have to disagree about censorship requiring government involvement by definition.

Imagine a small town with one library that is the only accessible source of books for many people. If, say, a bunch of parents get up in arms and demand that they pull Huckleberry Finn from the shelves, and the library does that, then that's... a really bad thing, I would say, with specific adverse consequences. And how bad it is has very little to do with whether that library was run by the town or was run by a non-governmental charitable organization.

It's not a *First Amendment* violation unless the government gets involved, but we do ourselves a serious disservice (in many areas, not just with regard to censorship) if we stop distinguishing between the moral status of an act and its legal status under the present civil framework.

Censorship in America!

Posted Jan 18, 2009 20:33 UTC (Sun) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link]

Well then that is just local, smaller forms of government. Usually in situations like your describing the small town library isn't privately maintained or financed.. so they are dependent on the political whims of whoever the people in local council are afraid of.

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There is a fundamental principal to Free speech and whatnot that tends to scale very well from smaller areas to very large regions. Ethics/Moral type things, in their purest form, tend to be like that... apply just as well to 'micro' situations as 'macro', hence they can be considered 'universal' or 'natural' laws due to the universal nature of their application.