this kind of censorship does not start: art's arguments would be fine if all that was at issue really was nudity in prime-time broadcast television, i guess (i am not in agreement, but i can respect the position)--but it is not.
witness this latest idiocy.
i pasted it from an email list i am on: it came without a source link beyond being from AP.
Quote:
Wal-Mart sued over Evanescence lyrics
HAGERSTOWN, Md. (AP) ? Wal-Mart Stores Inc., which promotes itself as a
seller of clean music, deceived customers by stocking compact discs by the
rock group Evanescence that contain the f-word, a lawsuit claims.
The hit group's latest CD and DVD, Anywhere But Home, don't carry parental
advisory labels alerting potential buyers to the obscenity. If they did,
Wal-Mart wouldn't carry them, according to the retailer's policy.
But the lawsuit claims Wal-Mart knew about the explicit lyrics in the song,
Thoughtless, because it censored the word in a free sample available on its
Web site and in its stores.
The complaint, filed Thursday in Washington County Circuit Court, seeks an
order requiring Wal-Mart to either censor or remove the music from its
Maryland stores. It also seeks damages of up to $74,500 for each of the
thousands of people who bought the music at Wal-Marts in Maryland.
"I don't want any other families to get this, expecting it to be clean. It
needs to be removed from the shelves to prevent other children from hearing
it," said plaintiff Trevin Skeens of Brownsville.
Skeens said he and his wife, Melanie, let their daughter buy the music for
her 13th birthday and were shocked when they played it in their car while
driving home.
Wal-Mart, of Bentonville, Ark., has no immediate plans to pull the CDs from
its shelves, spokesman Guy Whitcomb told The (Hagerstown) Herald-Mail. He
said the company will investigate the allegations. No hearing dates have
been set.
"While Wal-Mart sets high standards, it would not be possible to eliminate
every image, word or topic that an individual might find objectionable,"
Whitcomb told the newspaper.
He told the Herald-Mail that the song sample online was censored by
Walmart.com, a separate division of Wal-Mart.
Whitcomb didn't return telephone calls Friday from The Associated Press.
The lawsuit also names as defendants Wind-up Records LLC, the New York-based
company that recorded the music and decided not to apply parental-advisory
stickers; and distributor BMG Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony BMG Music
Entertainment, of New York.
Sony BMG declined to comment on the lawsuit. Wind-up didn't return calls
from the AP.
The Skeens' lawyer, Jon Pels of Bethesda, said he aims to "take this case
national, even if that means going state by state."
He dismissed Whitcomb's suggestion that Wal-Mart stores didn't know about
the censored version of the song. "They are a multimillion-dollar
corporation and they certainly can communicate among their various
entities," he said.
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edit (was interrupted):
i do not really accept efforts to seperate various types of censorship.
not in this particular climate, which is in general characterized by the protestant fundamentalist right flexing its political muscle after delivering votes for cowboy george in the last debacle of an election.
nor can i tell from the above who would qualify as the "unscrupulous interest"...while i might be generally inclined to see that interest in capital, here i looks a whole lot more like it is whomever is behind this lawsuit.