Well "piracy" to mean any kind of unauthorized or improper copying is nearly as old as the printing press, which predates Blackbeard and a lot of the kinds of pirates you are imagining.
Censorship is the suppression of speech or other public communication which may be considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or inconvenient as determined by a government, media outlet, or other controlling body. It can be done by governments and private organizations or by individuals who engage in self-censorship. It occurs in a variety of different contexts including speech, books, music, films and other arts, the press, radio, television, and the Internet for a variety of reasons including national security, to control obscenity, child pornography, and hate speech, to protect children, to promote or restrict political or religious views, to prevent slander and libel, and to protect intellectual property. It may or may not be legal. Many countries provide strong protections against censorship by law, but none of these protections are absolute and it is frequently necessary to balance conflicting rights in order to determine what can and cannot be censored.posted by JHarris at 11:30 AM on June 10, 2012 [2 favorites]
As someone who has had a not-few comments censored by the mods: that's horseshit. The mods are not in general practice of shuttind down factual statements on the basis of their personal dislikes.What he said was that people call it censorship if they like the poster, and don't call it censorship if they don't. I don't how accurate that is, but he didn't say anything like that the mods delete comment based on their personal preferences.
So there turns out to be a vast body of literature documenting humanity's (as yet totally unsettled) longstanding and -winded argument with itself about what rights are and what their source is. The claim that rights are based largely on the codified whims of a bunch of entities with an economic stake in those codifications is actually a fairly extraordinary claim; it's sort of on a par with claiming that one has the right to access mediocre-to-shitty "content" free of charge.Maybe somewhere there is someone smart enough to argue for copyright on solid philosophical grounds, but from what I've seen the arguments proffered are all pretty dumb, as if people are totally unable to understand that simply popping into their head does not make an idea correct.
For fucks sake, we still have problems with local libraries getting pressured to ban books, and librarians getting arrested for reading banned books. Do you really think these systems and processes won't be abused?Uh, you might want to read that article more carefully.
Or do you belive that we are actually speaking latin at this moment?
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posted by Philosopher Dirtbike at 4:12 AM on June 10, 2012 [91 favorites]