This image violated
Apr. 23rd, 2009 04:10 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomus
How many seconds does the average computer user spend reading the terms of use agreement that comes with new software, or membership of a Web 2.0 online service? I'm sure there are ways for the companies concerned to find out, and I'm sure all the indications are that we read several pages of legal text in less than one second. These companies must think we're either incredibly clever, or incredibly stupid.The fact is, millions of people -- people like me, and perhaps you -- find it perfectly reasonable to click the "Accept" button mere seconds after it appears, and to tell the little white lie that we've "read and accepted the terms of use" even when we haven't bothered to click through to them. Jargon-filled and incredibly un-entertaining, terms of use contracts are there to be skipped, shunned and neglected. They only become relevant when one of the parties in the relationship becomes unhappy with the other's behaviour.
If you're like me, you don't bother reading terms of use contracts when conflicts do occur, either. I mean, what's the point? It's not like this is the Lady Chatterley trial or something. It's just software, it's on the internet, a medium designed to route around damage as easily as it routes around censorship. Terms of use contracts are a form of insurance for companies, covering their asses if their users offend third parties or flout the law, making sure there are no negative consequences for themselves. Nobody expects you to read them.
Today's entry is a little exhibition of all the photos my image hosting service, Photobucket, has refused to display over the past year or so, and replaced with little red "panic flags" or "censorship stickers" marked: "This image or video violated our terms of use".I never challenge these decisions, never question the process by which they were made. Sometimes I rehost the offending image elsewhere (as I've done today, hosting the images the American company rejected on a Norwegian server instead), but usually I don't bother; by the time Photobucket staff gets to the images, decides they "violate", and shutters them, it's usually a day or so later and the Click Opera piece is old news. (These are obviously decisions machines can't make, and humans are -- luckily for me -- expensive and slow.)
The forbidden images in this "exhibition" mostly involve nudity and sexual explicitness. The image on the right, for instance, comes from Is blech-pharoplasty Western-eyes-ation?, a Click Opera piece about how Japanese porn stars are having operations to make their eyes bigger. The offending images are already mosaic-censored according to Japanese government guidelines, but Photobucket's moral operatives have (correctly) inferred the presence of penises and seen fit to apply the ultimate mosaic -- one featuring a single huge red pixel and a no-entry sign (the traffic metaphor is interesting -- have we tried to enter a one-way street the wrong way? Is this a sexual violation, a contractual violation, or a traffic violation?).
This exhibition -- which is NSFW, "not safe for work", the modern, buck-passing, sublimated equivalent of good old-fashioned "moral turpitude" ("It doesn't offend me, you understand, but violates my contract of employment") -- continues under "the cut" (the modern, vaginal version of the plain vanilla wrapper).
This set of images by Yasumasa Yonehara originally accompanied The good things, an entry from March. I can't see any naked breasts or sex organs in this at all, but I guess it's "sexy".
From an entry called Peoplewatching at the canteen, this is a shot of porn star / artist Fareeza Terunuma exhibiting at Geisai 12. She's sitting demurely on a toilet, fully clothed, so I can only assume Photobucket's moral operatives went through the images on the wall behind her with a magnifying glass and were able to detect a couple of jaggy nipple pixels here and there. Voila, violation!
A piece about bikes, Fixated on the fixie, used photos by Alin Huma, including this one of his partner Chie topless. The violating points here are clearly her nipples, two deceptively peaceful-looking buds capable of sending a resounding rift through employment contracts and terms of use alike.
This is an image from Chim↑Pom @ NADiff a/p/a/r/t, and it's presumably the artist's buttocks which violate the social contract so harmfully. To think we all smuggle a similar pair of these lethal weapons beneath a layer or two of clothing! Social dynamite!
Edison Chen not only electrified China with his home videos, but set America alight too. The girl's erogenous zones are covered up, and the teddy bear looks unphazed, but clearly Edison has touched a sore point.
When you were my pervert octopus, and I was your sex sailor linked to a series of images by illustrator Toshio Saeki (hosted, apparently without any problem, by Imageshack). This one, though, got flagged by Photobucket, despite not showing any nudey parts. Oh, I suppose the little wind-up man does have his trousers down. Wait, what am I saying? The lines representing "a little wind-up man" have the lines representing "trousers" down.
In a comment under an entry revealing the Ocky Milk sleeve someone innocently observed "we'd buy it even if the cover were a nude picture of Alan Greenspan". I made a quick paste-up of the ugly scene, and a few days later Photobucket decided Greenspan's breasts exhibited "irrational exuberance" and deserved a "correction".
We didn't quite meet was an entry which happened to include this image -- of my friends Gilles and Flo posing as models in Yukinori Maeda's 2003 Cosmic Wonder art / fashion show. Maeda based his composition on old photographs he'd discovered, and included only the bits of clothing actually visible in the photo, leaving the rest of Gilles and Flo's bodies naked. Photobucket human operatives (I wonder if they sit in cubicles in an open plan space, or have their own private rooms?) were even more conceptual and minimalist; they removed the clothes and the bodies.
The Death-Mask of the Ginza was a mock-Gothic piece about dead Japanese make-up tycoon Sonoko, whose ghoulish visage floats, to this day, above the Ginza offices of the company she founded. Someone had given her a new young body, but the Bucketmen took it away again, and as a result Sonoko is once more dead.
With extraordinary prescience, artist Richard Killeen made this drawing, entitled The Trickle Down Economy, and depicting bankers and businessmen pissing on everyone else, back in 1998, ten years before the rest of us decided bankers were pissing on us. I used the illustration for Trickle up: pigs in the pipe, a piece about the selfishness of the Baby Boom generation. The Boomer-friendly Bucket blanked the satire, presumably because of the key confusion between noses and pricks on display.
This image of a naked man in the pose of Michaelangelo's Adam was tame enough to be plastered all over Berlin billboards as advertising for sober German daily newspaper Die Zeit. But when I published the exact same image in A naked man in Berlin, Photobucket decided it was a violation.
Is everybody naked a friend? I asked, referencing the mass public nudity of Spencer Tunick and Ryan McGinley's snaps of his friends partying hard. "A public enemy!" came the thundering voice of the image host on high.
This is the most mysterious decision of the lot. I ran a piece called Guild splicing, and used a children's game which allows you to mix and mismatch various parts of various professions, to make funny hybrids. There's no nudity or lewdness here, as far as I can see, unless mixing gender signifiers is considered treason. Photobucket ran the other four images in the series, which also mix genders. Can it be that a decision was made that the figure on the left doesn't actually have a pistol in his pocket, but is pleased to see us? Surely some dirty-minded cleaner-upper jumped the gun here.
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 03:00 am (UTC)"Nobody here's offended, I'm not offended, we're just considering the sensibilities of those who would be offended, you understand."
When I was 18 I applied for some shitty catering job. I went for the interview, the interviewer liked me and offered me the job on the condition I shaved off my mohawk which I had at the time. He said "Don't get me wrong, I personally don't mind, it's just customers might have an issue with it." I refused the job.
Quite recently, at my old office job, I happened to mention that I'd been saving up to get my arms tattooed. My boss heard about it through my manager and he decided to have a conversation with me about it. He was all "I heard you're having tattoos done. If that's the case I can't have you going off site to give presentations to clients anymore". I asked him why and he said "Don't get me wrong, I don't care if you have tattoos, it's our clients. Other less open-minded people wouldn't take you seriously as a professional in this industry".
It seems to me that most of the censorship that goes on in the world is about the majority respecting the delicate (and sometimes bigoted) sensibilities of the minority. It might be because I mainly associate with latitudinarians rather than up-tight prudes that I find this to be the case, but still, a nipple and a pair of buttocks never hurt anybody.
(no subject)
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Date: 2009-04-23 08:44 am (UTC)It always fascinates me how even abstract representations of (or allusions to) sex have the power to offend or arouse.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 09:26 am (UTC)Like in the examples of 'pre-emoptive censorship' Kuma posted, the idea of 'causing offence' is actually when you think about it quite meaningless. How can it be measured? Do we have a God-given right not to be offended by life? what evidence is there that being offended by something harms us?
BTW, I'm not referring to that which incites physical harm to others pernicious stuff like pernicious, racist or homophobic hate speech (of whose legitimation we all know the possible consequences; demonstrated by history).
More worryingly, I think this kind of preemptive censorship nonsense will get worse. Forget individual pictures; new restrictions are being planned, based on control over the whole idea of internet use, by the private sector - ISPs -in another of those unholy alliances that seem to charaterise the EU (between big business and those who should be representing and defending our freedoms) see: http://www.blackouteurope.eu/
sample text: "Under the proposed new rules, broadband providers will be legally able to limit the number of websites you can look
at, and to tell you whether or not you are allowed to use particular services. It will be dressed up as ‘new consumer options' which people can choose from. People will be offered TV-like packages - with a limited
number of options for you to access.
It means that the Internet will be packaged up and your ability to access and to put up content could be severely restricted. It will create boxes of Internet accessibility, which don't fit with the way we use it today. This is because internet is now permitting exchanges between persons which cannot be controlled or "facilitated" by any middlemen (the state or a corporation) "
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 09:58 am (UTC)Isn't simply having no internet access at all the ultimate censorship and control?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 10:04 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 10:06 am (UTC)About the scare stories, I see your point, but that doesn't mean we should let our guard down.
The sad truth is, as demonstrated by history, that indistry left to its own devices invariably ends up curtailing rights for profitmaking. Eternal vigilance and all that.....
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 10:26 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-24 12:48 am (UTC)And in America, any industry-wide attempt to "package" the internet would itself come under scrutiny by the federal government, since this would almost certainly constitute collusion among the various industry entities.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 11:24 am (UTC)Nothing's been banned per se, but it's made me very self-conscious about the sites I visit.
Could reading Chomsky get me in a nick a few years down the line?
Who was it that said words to the effect of: " give me six lines written by the most virtuous man and I wiull find something to hang him by"?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 11:28 am (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2009-04-23 11:41 am (UTC)Cardinal Richelieu, I think.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 11:57 am (UTC)[Error: unknown template video]
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 11:27 am (UTC)The law exists, it seems, not to be known, or read, or even observed, but to be a pretext for persecuting really troublesome people "by the book" rather than based on perceived personal animus. The law, in other words, shares something with the idea of NSFW. It's a way to say "It's not that you're offending me personally, just that your behaviour is potentially offending somewhere further down the line -- specifically, Subsection 8 of Clause 3 of Section B of Law 23989, enacted in 1921."
But actually, it is that you're offending me personally. I just don't want you to lash out at me when you get released from prison. The law -- which neither I nor you have read, but which my lawyer believes we can use against you -- is my alibi.
It's interesting that Photobucket have only intervened to block photos showing sexual scenes or nudity. You'd think copyright would be more of an issue. But I suppose ownership of images is much less evident to the, ahem, naked eye. In any case, my copyright policy is the same as pretty much anyone else's on the entire internet; I post images prepared to take them down later if the copyright owner objects. So far, that has never happened. But it does make you wonder whether copyright law -- which all of us break every single day -- means anything at all.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 11:51 am (UTC)Eric Berne, pioneer of Transactional Analysis, postulated the idea of a Game called 'Now I've Got You You Son Of A Bitch', where the Black would have a secret stash of unwritten, unverbalised rules, and would wait silently for White to transgress one of them. When the hapless White does cross the line, either by breaking some unknown aspect of Health and Safety legislation, some Office Rule, or some domestic thing, Black will come down on them like a ton of bricks.
I used to work on the OPSI website, uploading all the faffy little Statutory Instruments that spewed forth from the Government. I had to convert them to HTML and upload them onto the site by 2.30pm each day.
There were thousands upon thousands of these each year. Here's a link to yesterday's: http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/sis22-04
The sheer scale of regualtion in this country is mindboggling.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 12:18 pm (UTC)I think Kafka really understood the essential arbitrary absurdity of the law better than anyone. He will never go out of fashion, because the law he wrote about will always be with us, and will keep accumulating its surreal absurdities, which will continue to exist in a parallel universe to the power relationships which actually determine our lives.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 12:26 pm (UTC)This means that unless you fully understand the text that's being referred to as well as the one you're reading you're going to get stuck.
Another problem is that you can find yourself reading an act, or a part of an act, or an instrument that has been repealed by something further down the line.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 11:55 am (UTC)So in America, it very much is a case of the State saying "You have offended our common person, according to X legal statute." In this case, the laws seem to exist as the values, morals, and ideals to be offended in the common person. They are the things which we, generally speaking, agree to be communally offended by if people are found to have done them.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 01:14 pm (UTC)Remember the Janet Jackson boob thing? The only reason the FCC went after them is because the regulations imposed on that format are extremely unique to television. Nowhere else do we see those regulations in the US imposed by any degree of state authority.
Your issue with Photobucket is that it's business model is: family site for the kiddies, and maybe some of you internet weirdos, too. If you don't like the model, go somewhere else: like ones oriented to adults, or foreign sites where the culture doesn't believe hiding families from nudity is an important thing to do.
All in all, it really has nothing to do with law, though.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 01:27 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 01:33 pm (UTC)AWAY TO NORWAY WITH YOU, children's game!
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 04:39 pm (UTC)Another thing in UK contract law states that contracts must be 'fair' as well.
This leads us back to the terms of service thing Momus mentioned earlier. It also begs the question: are such ToSs legally enforceable if most people don't read them, even if they say they do?
Common law has it that laws and regulations must be interpreted reasonably. Would it be reasonable to assume that someone has read a lengthy selection of jargonese paragraphs prior to installing a computer game or joining a social network site, say?
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-24 12:59 am (UTC)If you wanted to make a site where you could -only- upload pictures of nude Japanese girls, you can create it and enforce the ToS just like the one above. It's just as enforceable and legitimate as Photobucket's ToS. There really aren't any reflections on the legal world or America, aside from America's stupid obsession with hiding our own bodies from the daylight.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-24 09:26 am (UTC)Protect us from ourselves, oh benevolent pervert.
Date: 2009-04-23 12:42 pm (UTC)As your post infers the censor is probably a good deal more dirty-minded than the rest of us, deleting images in between furiously thudding him/herself off.
Re: Protect us from ourselves, oh benevolent pervert.
Date: 2009-04-23 02:50 pm (UTC)Re: Protect us from ourselves, oh benevolent pervert.
Date: 2009-04-23 07:21 pm (UTC)Re: Protect us from ourselves, oh benevolent pervert.
Date: 2009-04-23 07:52 pm (UTC)Japanese flashers (would anyone notice?)
Date: 2009-04-23 05:21 pm (UTC).
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/asia/japanese-pop-star-tsuyoshi-kusanagi-arrested-for-alleged-indecency-1673034.html
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-23 06:54 pm (UTC)pop star Theresa Fu
And that second porn star looks like this
(no subject)
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Date: 2009-04-24 02:58 am (UTC)This is similar to what tv stations were doing when they got caught using The Time Machine (http://archive.southcoasttoday.com/daily/11-01/11-18-01/d06bu119.htm) a few years ago.
I get your larger point, but since film is a collaborative art form, and most directors and dp's are artists for hire, this bothers me less than something eclectictronik said above -- "Do we have a God-given right not to be offended by life? what evidence is there that being offended by something harms us?
BTW, I'm not referring to that which incites physical harm to others pernicious stuff like pernicious, racist or homophobic hate speech (of whose legitimation we all know the possible consequences; demonstrated by history)."
That is a bit too much of a slippery slope for a supporter of the First amendment such as myself. It is not a liberty I am ready to give away so easily because some hate speech offended me.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-04-24 04:32 am (UTC)Also, an artist is hired to, say, direct a movie, which one would assume implies that the artist is going to oversee production and shape the final result. And of course, the director doesn't really actually have the power to shape the final product, because that responsibility is stripped away at the last minute. Just because movies are, in a sense, artistic piecework, doesn't mean that the people in question each get a fair shot at doing the service they've been hired to do, and so we can't complain about concessions being made on the final product. There's a reason why "final cut" is such a highly sought after perk among film directors ... because it's almost certain that, without it, the director isn't really going to get to do the complete job he/she was hired to do (that is, to oversee the entire filmmaking process).
Aren't we just preaching to the choir by putting typical examples of things that offend people at the center of a censorship debate? In America, I don't think there's any real danger of this kind of censorship truly shutting down legal avenues of accessing those materials we wish to see. If you aren't getting hardcore sex on network TV, then you can go on the internet and find near-instant gratification. I mean, is anybody here really scared that it's all going away tomorrow?
Censorship as a model of fitness
Date: 2009-04-23 09:36 pm (UTC)It'd be interesting to create a pure ("not much pre-programed information") painting system that uploads its creations to photobucket, and if it is censored, it is considered to be fit, and it's code is selected for further evolution.
Perhaps image area should be factored, as to reward individuals to offend using the least number of pixels.
In general - using the internet (for example, page hits) seems like an intriguing way to shape evolution. The most interesting researchers on this are spammer, I think.
This image violated
Date: 2009-04-24 04:48 pm (UTC)I think the main problem with image-wise censorship is the alleged 'protection' clause. While being impossible to manage or check the source of the picture, and in what context it will be used, image hosting sites decide to and a takedown anything within this very small range of subjects. And at the same time, such a wide range of things fall into that tiny gap.
The censorship then, lies in the hands and mind of one single person. I wonder who does this job. I wonder what kind of moral code he/she uses to deem an image as 'unsuitable' or 'suitable' and what kind of ethic is employed on this. Does he or she feel bad on seeing such images, are these images he/she would like their kids to see, does he/she think these images are 'filthy'? Do they merely follow someone else's orders and quickly save these images to their hard disks for future appreciation and delete them form the server...
Or do they stand on their kness before a computer with a bble on the hands gnashing its teeth to every provocative nipple or naked body to appear on the server... It is certainly a quite funny image to picture.
But back to the 'protection'. Who do they protect? Themselves as a company? Or themselves (and 'the world') from this 'dirty' pictorial consciousness of flesh and human behavior? Where is the wrong and where is the right into the this lot?
Puzzles me the fact that when a man exposes his chest is considered masculine, a refreshment-filled act on summer days and just plain usual. And NORMAL. But when a woman exposes hers, it is either offensive, sinful or consequently assumedly lead to sexual tones and the 'promise-to-have-or-consume-erotical-stimulus'. Quite interesting, isn't it?
Quite a lot of questions raised.
Cheers from Brazil
thiago