Quote:
Originally Posted by emellaich
1) If I publish a Kindle book and require you to pay to read it is that keeping you from reading it?
2) If the military distributes operational orders on a top secret mission to its field teams in Kindle format, should you be able to read it?
3) What about the diary I mentioned earlier in the thread?
4) What if Amazon chooses not to publish a book on child pornography?
Arguably, ebooks are the least censored of all book formats. It used to be that there were many gatekeepers between creators and readers. Publishers had to agree to publish the book, editors at the publishers could edit (censor) the book, and the limited shelf space at retailers meant that they had to choose which books to carry. Amazon, on the other hand, will 'publish' just about any ebook
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To address your initial points:
(1) The clearest answer is: money. With print books, the only restriction is that you couldn't create a copy of the book. Yet you could still pass it on. With electronic media, it is easier to copy than to 'pass on' books. Indeed, the simple act of reading an ebook involves making an implicit copy from permanent storage (e.g. flash memory or a hard drive) into RAM and from RAM into the video chip's memory. With modern systems, these two copies may represent the entire work and can create legal loopholes unless the issue is considered carefully.
(2) and (3) This is, at best, a marginal application of copyright law and has nothing to do with censorship. By marginal application I mean that copyright law can be applied to sue parties that make copies of material that is under copyright (by default). It is not censorship because these materials are not, strictly speaking, published.
(4) This is a quagmire. The best argument against publishing child pornography, in terms of photos and videos and such, is that it is the product of child abuse. As such it should be promptly reported so that the perpetrators can be prosecuted. "Creative works" are a more interesting case because they do not (necessarily) involve child abuse, so many free speech advocates will view blocking such material as censorship. I think that the best argument for censoring "creative works" is to treat it as a form of hate speech. Many free speech advocates won't agree with that interpretation, but society at large will.
On ebooks being the least censored format, I really don't think that's true. The 'Amazon will publish almost anything' bit is really a reflection of self-publishing. And that exists in print as well. The big difference is that Amazon gives 'shelf space' to self published works, and that Amazon is a huge retailer of books. But I think that, in the long term, people will start looking for a reputable publisher's imprint because that filter is a valuable tool for determining the quality of the work. (And, let's face it, if you didn't care about the quality of the work you would just read random websites. Those are the least censored forms of publication.) I would like to think otherwise, because it would be wonderful to judge authors upon merit rather than authority. On the other hand, merit is hard to gauge in Amazon's current publishing model (since it is easy to game).