Quote:
Originally Posted by Elfwreck
Yes, they are: it's against the law to do business with some people and not others and imply you have the same standards for everyone.
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But they are not violating the law by doing business with some people and not another. There is no law that says a company must sell every product under the sun. It is up to the person to decide whether or not Amazon is selling what they want to buy. Amazon is not forcing them to buy only from them nor is it trying to stifle anyone else from selling what they don't choose to. And given the seemingly deliberate vagueness of the wording of their content agreements, there is no implication that their standards are the same across the board for every type of product that they might sell.
I think that trying to separate the legal and moral arguments is disingenuous in this instance. People who are trying to make a case against what Amazon has done are implying that they are violating laws against discrimination, yet when it is being pointed out that no such thing is being done they are saying that it is a moral issue instead of a legal one, and dismissing the legal facts. You can't have one without the other. Either something is discrimination under the law, or else it's merely something that you (a general "you" here) don't think is fair - and that definition of fairness is not necessarily that of others.
This is not an issue comparable to the legal/moral battles fought during the civil rights era. This is corporate policy regarding what they choose to sell versus what some people think they should be selling - a totally different creature. Trying to elevate this issue to a level comparable to a broad-based, in-grained, society-wide behavior of racial discrimination is trying, IMO, to make a mountain out of a mole hill.
A thought: if Amazon no longer sells certain types of yaoi, is that being viewed as removing the mainstream "seal of approval" so to speak, from it? Is that possibly what is underlying some of the consternation? Because if Amazon won't sell it, it becomes a more marginalized genre once again and loses the protective cloak of "well, if Amazon sells it then it isn't really pornography"?