Monday, March 21, 2011

CENSORED! (again)

So, this past weekend we were censored on two different fronts.  The two YouTube videos that had been up for several months were both pulled down by YouTube management and our account on their site was terminated for “violations of community standards”.  When I appealed the deletion of my video, they rejected the appeal stating that it was sexual in nature and reviewed the other video and cancelled the entire channel (and suspended my account).

If you go on to YouTube, you can find that people have posted entire segments of the Chained Heroes: Corporal Punishment DVD; these posting are of copyrighted material (which the people that posted them to YouTube undoubtedly do not own) and show nothing more or less than what we had published: shirtless men being whipped.  So, it’s not the censorship itself which bothers me (I understood when I made my postings that it was their space and they had the right to do it), it is the inconsistency of their application of their policies:  I actually own the copyrights to my material (since it is original material I created) and I show things not at all unlike other posted videos that have been up for months or years and have received tens or hundreds of thousands of views.

Worse than that, this very blog was deleted for a day (Saturday, March 20).  I was given no advance (or even after-the-fact) notice of the deletion or the reason for it, I had to discover it for myself by trying to login to view the blog’s stats. I could only conclude that there was a connection between the YouTube decision to delete my material and the Blogger decision to do the same.  I was relieved that I had backed up the site on my alternate host site only a few days ago, and therefore only lost one post and a few user comments.  I noticed when I returned from my Saturday excursion that the blog was back up on Sunday morning with all material intact. 

I want to keep the blog at the Blogspot address because of the ease with which people can find it (due to Google directories, etc), but I ask all of our fans to bookmark the WhippingDudes archive (alternate host) address in case this happens again.    Thank you for your continued support.

10 comments:

  1. I hate censorship! I'm new to blogging--how do I "back up" a blog? I wonder every day if the gofflnazis will wipe me out...

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  2. I backed up my website by having a friend create a subdomain on his business URL for me. Then I just import the Blogspot posts and comments to that (I had been backing it up once or twice a month, but I'm going to start doing it more often than that now).

    The reason I made the back up was because I feared someone would object to my work on the this blog and censor me--looks like I was right, eh?

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  3. I'm not defending Google's choices (Google owns both Youtube and Blogger), but it's their servers and they make the rules. If you look at their Terms of Service (or whatever they call the equivalent document) as I did when YT first started pulling down the videos of newlatigazos, you will see that the 2 key terms to consider are shock and context. Setting aside copyright concerns, the whipping in Starship Troopers has context, it's part of a larger story. Taliban floggings, though very shocking, have context, the entire human rights news/history.

    In this light, when a Google censor encounters your videos, he sees something liable to shock the average viewer, without any context that might redeem or reduce the shock value. I suppose things like the whipping of Derekson009, or of "Deakon Wicked" by mutilationoftheflesh, while borderline, are less shocking, because both are boys (or young adults, late teens/early 20's) just fooling around, experimenting, discovering themselves, not seriously into it.

    As to comparisons of your taken-down content to content that remains, it's mostly random. Google does not have the resources to monitor all content on their services. They've been very clear on that in various court filings and lawsuit defenses. As a matter of fact, as long as they don't directly monitor content, as I understand US law (but note, IANAL, nor do I play one on TV), they are immune from legal action for content produced and posted by others on their servers unless and until someone calls it to their attention. Therefore, most copyright takedowns are the result of rights owners sending takedown notices. Similarly, they don't check for ToS violations unless they receive complaints. Unfortunately, there are a few neo-Puritans who stay awake at night worrying that somewhere, someone is enjoying life (apologies to RR, who applied this metaphor to his political opponents), and I suspect that some of them have made it a mission to go looking for shocking content, and becoming, ... can you believe it ... SHOCKED! ... at what they find. So shocked, in fact, that they demand Google take it down. All that other comparable content that hasn't been taken down is just content that the neo-Puritans haven't gotten around to finding yet.

    Like it or not (and I definitely don't like it), those are Google's rules, and since it's Google's servers, they have the right and power to make and enforce the rules.

    The guy who had all the newlatigazos has started putting up his banned content on his multiply.com pages. Signup is fairly painless, they don't require a real name, an address, or a picture. If one chooses to restrict one's content to "friends" and/or "online buddies", one can more or less ensure the neo-Puritans can't find it and therefore can't complain. Time will tell how long his videos last on that site. Having the videos hidden cuts both ways, the neo-Puritans can't find them, but neither can the indexers, or those with serious curiosity and interest. If you do go to multiply.com, I suggest turning off HTML and images in one's Guestbook, hide the Guestbook altogether, or police it like a hawk, because someone is going around posting child porn (pictures) to Guestbooks, and multiply will take down accounts where it hasn't removed.

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  4. I'm not defending Google's choices (Google owns both Youtube and Blogger), but it's their servers and they make the rules. If you look at their Terms of Service (or whatever they call the equivalent document) as I did when YT first started pulling down the videos of newlatigazos, you will see that the 2 key terms to consider are shock and context. Setting aside copyright concerns, the whipping in Starship Troopers has context, it's part of a larger story. Taliban floggings, though very shocking, have context, the entire human rights news/history.

    In this light, when a Google censor encounters your videos, he sees something liable to shock the average viewer, without any context that might redeem or reduce the shock value. I suppose things like the whipping of Derekson009, or of "Deakon Wicked" by mutilationoftheflesh, while borderline, are less shocking, because both are boys (or young adults, late teens/early 20's) just fooling around, experimenting, discovering themselves, not seriously into it.

    As to comparisons of your taken-down content to content that remains, it's mostly random. Google does not have the resources to monitor all content on their services. They've been very clear on that in various court filings and lawsuit defenses. As a matter of fact, as long as they don't directly monitor content, as I understand US law (but note, IANAL, nor do I play one on TV), they are immune from legal action for content produced and posted by others on their servers unless and until someone calls it to their attention. Therefore, most copyright takedowns are the result of rights owners sending takedown notices. Similarly, they don't check for ToS violations unless they receive complaints. Unfortunately, there are a few neo-Puritans who stay awake at night worrying that somewhere, someone is enjoying life (apologies to RR, who applied this metaphor to his political opponents), and I suspect that some of them have made it a mission to go looking for shocking content, and becoming, ... can you believe it ... SHOCKED! ... at what they find. So shocked, in fact, that they demand Google take it down. All that other comparable content that hasn't been taken down is just content that the neo-Puritans haven't gotten around to finding yet.

    Like it or not (and I definitely don't like it), those are Google's rules, and since it's Google's servers, they have the right and power to make and enforce the rules.

    The guy who had all the newlatigazos videos has started putting up his banned content on his multiply.com pages. Signup is fairly painless, they don't require a real name, an address, or a picture. If one chooses to restrict one's content to "friends" and/or "online buddies", one can more or less ensure the neo-Puritans can't find it and therefore can't complain. Time will tell how long his videos last on that site. Having the videos hidden cuts both ways, the neo-Puritans can't find them, but neither can the indexers, or those with serious curiosity and interest. If you do go to multiply.com, I suggest turning off HTML and images in one's Guestbook, hide the Guestbook altogether, or police it like a hawk, because someone is going around posting child porn (pictures) to Guestbooks, and multiply will take down accounts where it hasn't removed.

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  5. I don't like censorship at all, but I knew that it was possible that my videos would be taken down. I agree that the servers belong to them and they can do as they like, but to say that my videos violate the community standards on sexual content is not credible. Just because someone finds sexual pleasure in watching floggings doesn't make it a sexual act; there isn't even any nudity--by any definition (shirtless men are not considered nude).

    What about all of the videos of bare feet on YouTube. Because some people get off on looking at bare feet, should YouTube pull all of those down?

    Again, I'm mostly just complaining about the censorship itself--and their uneven application of the rules--not their right to do it.

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  6. Just being a fusspot, but it was H. L. Mencken, not "RR" with the famous quote:

    "Puritanism: The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy."

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  7. Like most things, this censorship thing comes down to a persons opinion, nothing more. What is offensive in some manner to one person may not be the same to another, but whomever has the most clout wins.

    Buddy's right, it is their uneven application of the rules that stinks.

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  8. I'm the guy who posted the preview of Corporal Punishment on youtube. I'm sure it is only a matter of time before they take it down, even though chainedheroes.com does not exist anymore. I'm sorry to hear that your account was suspended. I'm glad you're still doing the blog. It is refreshing to have whipping videos that are not sexually oriented for a change. I wish you luck!

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  9. Thanks, Anonymous. I appreciate your participation.

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  10. LINKS - how can we post to the links on this blogsite? anyone interested in whips and floggers can contact mutual fans this way, more pics of mine are on flicker at:
    http://www.flickr.com/photos/61076035@N05/
    comments from guys interested in meeting my "best friends"?? floggingman at gmail . com

    ReplyDelete