Savage Popcorn

In March, Dr Tanya Byron published a review of the risks faced by children if exposed to “harmful or inappropriate material”" on the internet or in video games and recommended that the rating system for games be changed. She called for a new rating for games aimed at children aged 12 and over - greatly expanding the role of the BBFC in classifying games.

Ed Balls the Schools secretary called the report “ground breaking” and promised to implement all of the recommendations in full.

Culture Minister Margaret Hodge has announced a consultation on whether the recommendations should be implemented in full.

The Entertainment & Leisure Software Publishers Association (Elspa) is still in favour of retaining the industry-backed Pegi scheme became the only rating system. “The compromise that Tanya Byron recommended in her report was not a good one for child safety,” said Michael Rawlinson, managing director of Elspa.

Not content with going fishing for potential copyright violations on YouTube, Viacom are also claiming copyright for videos they don’t own (via).

Juxtaposer is an original animation made by Joanna Davidovich for her senior project. She copyrighted the film in 2006 and says that she “only entered into distribution agreements that were nonexclusive.”

And now she’s received a notification from YouTube that Viacom has made a copyright ownership claim to the film. She is, of course, disputing the claim and has documentation to support her case but – while the dispute is in progress - Viacom gets access to her video statistics.

Digging around a bit, it looks like the claim is a result of over-reliance on automated copyright claiming - either on the part of Viacom itself or a result of YouTube’s Video Identification Tool casting its net too widely. But Viacom does have form with these sorts of claims.

“With Viacom sending more than 160,000 DMCA takedown notices, it may not even be aware which videos it told YouTube to remove,” said the EFF. “If that’s right, then Viacom will inevitably end up censoring some perfectly legitimate videos—surely, the MoveOn/Brave New Films video is not the only example of a fair use that got caught in Viacom’s driftnet.”

Obviously, copyright owners do have every right to protect their intellectual property. However, the approach being taken by groups such as Viacom and YouTube is to assume that everyone is stealing everything; and when they start automating on this basis, these sorts of false positives become inevitable.

Being on the receiving end of a baseless accusation isn’t pleasant and this sort of behaviour is going to deter creators from sharing their content.

Ultimately, the burden of proof has to be on the copyright owner, not the accused, and accusing everyone and hoping for the best is neither a viable nor a reasonable approach to protecting intellectual property.

The actress who played Judith Iscariot in Monty Python’s Life of Brian became the mayor of Aberystwyth this year. And in one of those quirks of fate, it turns out that the film has been banned in this particular seaside resort for the past 30 years.

Not surprisingly, Sue Jones-Davies (for it is she) is seeking to overturn the ban.

It appears that the ban was recommended back in 1979 by a committee made up of church leaders and, once the fuss had died down, no-one in the council’s licensing department remembered it was in place. But it’s always useful to remind ourselves where pandering to religious sensitivities leads - doubly so as Aberystwyth was where I spent my student years.

Found at Pharyngula

Smoking is bad for you, it causes all sorts of nasty diseases and it makes you smell. It’s quite reasonable, therefore, that the British Medical Association is keen on reducing the numbers of smokers.

However, their demand that the BBFC take “pro-smoking content” (whatever that is) into account when vetting films does strike me as being both bizarre and disproportionate. It also seems pretty pointless when the only example they can come up with is one scene in Independence Day, a film that was released in 1996.

Film and TV makers already bend over backwards to avoid accusations of glamorising smoking so I really don’t see what the BMA expects to achieve with this. The cynic in me suspects that they don’t really expect to achieve anything and are motivated more by a desire to be seen to be “doing something” than any genuine belief that teenagers are taking up smoking because Will Smith lit up a cigar twelve years ago.

Last week I mentioned that, after losing the pointless and frivolous court case against the BBC, Stephen Green wrote to the targets of his antics to ask them to let him out of facing the consequences for his actions.

Green started a petition to have his court costs waived, which prompted Roger Utting (via) to start a counter-petition calling for the costs not to be waived.

Green started the legal action that he now claims he can’t afford and is, quite rightly, liable for the costs.

Everyone is entitled to free-speech - but no one’s religious beliefs should put them above the law, or be paid for by the tax payer without the tax payer’s direct consent.

Click here to see or sign the petition and, if you have a Facebook account, you can also show your support by joining the Facebook group.

Christian Voice, the one-man campaign led by Stephen Green, is a group with a rather sordid history of resorting to threats and blackmail in pursuit of their aims. One of these aims was Green’s campaign to ban Jerry Springer: The Opera, which he lost rather spectacularly.

Now he’s facing bankruptcy.

At a hearing a fortnight ago, the BBC’s Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday, producer of JSTO, were awarded costs totalling £90,000 against Green. The BBC’s solicitors were awarded £55,000 and Olswangs Solicitors, who acted for Thoday, got an order for £35,000.

The money was due to be paid yesterday, but Stephen Green is pleading poverty.

And in an incredible display of bare-faced cheek he has written to both Mark Thompson and Jonathan Thoday asking them to waive their costs “in the interests of goodwill and justice”.

Goodwill? Justice? This man has no idea what these words mean. This is the man that heads a nasty little group (membership: Stephen Green) that has been willing to blackmail a cancer charity into refusing money raised on its behalf by JSTO, and has repeatedly used harassment and intimidation in its fanatical campaigns against JSTO and gay organisations it disapproves of.

I shall attempt to resist the temptation to gloat and suggest instead that if Green really does believe in his god, he should start praying.

The latest film to fall foul of exaggerated religious sensitivities is Mike Myers’ latest comedy, The Love Guru which has become the target of a petition, even othough none of the people objecting to it have actually seen it.

Even though both Myers’ and Paramount Pictures, who produced the film, have pointed out that religion portrayed in the film is purely fictional.

Mike Myers himself has described the religion he lampoons as a “mythical creation - it’s like the Force in Star Wars”.

I can’t help but wonder whether Myers has accidentally identified the real sensitivity behind this premature outcry: that deep down the religious know as well as the rest of us that all religions are as fictional as the Force in Star Wars.

According to Bhavna Shinde of the Sanatan Society in the US: “They should draw a line when it comes to people’s faith.”

They shouldn’t, of course, especially when the faith in question is more made up than most. Or should we expect to see Christians complaining about being lampooned in Cthulhu?

Timothy Garton Ash talks a lot of sense about Fitna:

This is how a mature free society responds to such a film. Not by appeasement of murderers, not by censorship, and not simply by blanket condemnation. Let the majority ignore it - as they seem to have done so far, and heaven knows there are better things to do with your time - and let a minority of those interested engage with it (for my sins, I’ve watched it three times), take it apart, argue with it, reveal its game, refute the refutable and accept the irrefutable, separating those specks of truth from the fat turds of falsehood.

Personally, I think that Geert Wilders is an unpleasantly cynical populist with nothing new - or particularly interesting - to say. But even unpleasantly cynical populists have the right to air their opinions without being threatened.

According to Chortle (via), Stuart Lee is saying that he wouldn’t work on anything controversial on the scale of Jerry Springer: The Opera again because ‘idiots’ could too easily close it down.

The musical, which Lee had spent years developing, suffered financially when fundamentalist Christians decided to take offence and began campaigning against the show. Even though the High Court rejected an attempt to prosecute the show for blasphemy, Lee - probably rightly - feels that the furore would stop people investing time in controversial shows.

And this really is the point when faced with cases like this. Whether it’s Jerry Springer: The Opera, the Mo-Toons controversy, Behzti, or the the current Golden Compass silliness, religious groups do try to stifle our freedom of speech every time they decide to be offended and this gives rise to countless acts of self-censorship as as artists decide that they don’t want to be on the receiving end of someone’s irrational outrage.

We will never know what potential artistic delights have been lost because of the fear of offending someone’s primitive superstition.

Of course, it’s not just Americans - or a small subset of Americans - that seems to think that the only approach to any issue is to try and ban something.

Tory MP Julian Brazier is piloting legislation through Parliament to give MPs and the public more power to interfere in the work of the censors, including a power to ban games blamed (without evidence) for causing copycat violence. Brazier points to the fact that the UN found Britain to be “the worst place in the world to bring up children” and surveys showing a third of adults are afraid to leave their homes at night.

But his solution - banning stuff - is both bizarre and meaningless. There is no evidence of a connection between violent fiction and violence in reality and - in the case of Eastern Promise - not even a suggestion of such a link. So this proposed legislation won’t achieve anything positive. Instead, all it will do will be to encourage populist politicians to allow tabloid scare stories to drive their agendas.