Word: censorships
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DIED. ELMER GERTZ, 93, crusading Chicago civil rights attorney who helped Nathan Leopold, accused with Richard Loeb of young Bobby Franks' murder in 1924's "Crime of the Century," win parole in 1958; defended Henry Miller's explicit novel Tropic of Cancer against censorship; and overturned the murder conviction of Lee Harvey Oswald's killer, Jack Ruby; of pneumonia; in Chicago...
Second, these private censors are working to create a legal climate in which every attempt to resist censorship, explain how censorship functions or even subject censorware to normal consumer protection principles, is prohibited. These aren't free speech issues, the lawyers for the new corporate censors say, but simple problems of "copyright infringement" or "trade secrets...
First, in the age of the Internet, censorship is increasingly a private rather than public function. Legislators, such as Senator John S. McCain (R-Ariz.), who advocate requiring public libraries and other entities receiving federal funds to install "filtering" software are--deliberately or not--working to create a privatized censorship structure in which companies like Mattel do the censoring...
...program," they say. "Just because you bought a copy doesn't mean you're allowed to understand how it functions, or tell anyone else what you know about it." One must not publicize the stupidities of censorship; that would be violating sacred intellectual property rights...
...arrogance of businesses that intimidate their own customers is hard to fathom because it is so utterly counterproductive. Who will buy the movies, the music and the Mattel toys once those corporations have made themselves infamous throughout the Internet for prosecuting and harassing children? Private censorship through the intellectual property system is disgusting, but when practiced against one's own present and future customers it is also foolish. Perhaps mobilized consumers, boycotting products made by companies that sue to censor young people, will help those companies learn the error of their ways...