This image violated

[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.

Comments

[imomus.livejournal.com]

A wider issue today's entry raises: what exactly are laws for? I'd wager that -- although ignorance of the law is no defense -- nobody alive has read in full all the laws that are supposed to govern him/her. Not even people who've read Law have read all the laws, the regulations and agreements, national and international, that are supposed to provide the framework within which we operate. I'd also wager (though I'm not even sure such gambles are legal) that there's nobody alive who hasn't infringed some of these laws, regulations and agreements.

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.

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

The third para neatly encapsulates the whole 'by the book' mentality of many clipboard-toting types.

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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I opened one of those at random -- this one (http://www.opsi.gov.uk/si/si2009/uksi_20090975_en_1) -- and couldn't find the verb. There were lots of people the legislation seemed to apply to (ie "an accredited financial investigator who is— (a) a constable of a police force in England and Wales; (b) an immigration officer" etc) and there was a general subject heading (ie "proceeds of crime"), but I couldn't discover anywhere in the document what was being forbidden or allowed. This extremely long-winded "sentence" has subject and object but no verb. It seems designed not only not-to-be-read, but to be essentially unreadable.

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.

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

Worse still, they endlessly cross-reference each other, like a Kafkaesque Fighting Fantasy Novel.

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.

[krskrft.livejournal.com]

Actually, at least in America, when an alleged criminal is prosecuted, the prosecution is done in the name of "the People," or "the State." Which is why, in TV shows and whatnot, you'll hear the prosecution say "The People rest" or "The State rests," and the case will be called up as "The People vs. So-and-So."

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.

[(Anonymous)]

Your concerns in this post have nothing to do with the law. These are self-regulating standards set within an industry and reflect an extremely conservative business-minded stance on social values.

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.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Well, you have a point. But if social mores are the thing here, it's interesting that an American company would impose local social mores on an international clientele -- banning, for instance, an image of a Berlin billboard for a serious newspaper like Die Zeit. I could understand it if the law restricted what could be hosted in the country the company is based in, but when it's just local mores, I think a little more relativism and laissez faire would actually be good for business, especially when that business is international image hosting.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

And as for "go somewhere else", that's exactly what I do -- I host any even remotely sexy imagery on my Norwegian server. As I said in the piece, I never contest or question Photobucket's decisions. It's their service, they make the rules. But, you know, it's sometimes hard to second guess them -- that last image is a case in point. Who knew that a children's game in which you mismatch legs, torsos and heads could be obscene?

AWAY TO NORWAY WITH YOU, children's game!

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

I believe it is subject to legal enforcement via contract law. If you've entered a contract with Photobucket, and part of that contract stipulates (for sake of argument) that you don't host nudey jap girl pics on their servers, and that if you do they can remove them, then their side will be protected by law and they can legally whip them out of your folder on their server.

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?

[(Anonymous)]

The thing with contract law is that people can contract for whatever they bloody well please. What Photobucket's ToS represents are social values ... not really anything to do with the law. Law is just being used as a vehicle to enforce perfectly legitimate concerns held by Photobucket's investors; if those concerns involve not allowing a person to post a picture of boobs, so be it.

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.

[dogsolitude-v2.livejournal.com]

Well, yes, that is the case. I wasn't making a point about whether or not use of contract law to enforce a certain contract reflected Western values, more that it was enforcable because of contract law rather than because of a given society's prevailing morals.