GagWatch

The International Olympic Committee filed (via) a copyright infringement claim yesterday against a YouTube video of a Free Tibet protest at the Chinese Consulate in Manhattan Thursday night.

The video depicts demonstrators conducting a candlelight vigil and projecting a protest video onto the consulate building. The the projection features recent footage of Tibetan monks being arrested as well as riffs on the Olympic logo, representing them as handcuffs.

Inevitably enough, YouTube pulled the video, but it can still be seen on Vimeo.

Arab-Israeli publisher Salah Abassi has been ordered (via) to stop importing Arabic-language children’s books, such as Harry Potter and Pinocchio, from Syria and Lebanon. The ban also includes Arabic classics.

The ban is based on a 1939 decree - when the area was under British mandate - prohibiting the importation of books from hostile countries. According to Abassi, however, the Arabic translations of many of these books can be found only in Lebanon and Syria.

“If they were printed in Jordan or Egypt, which are friendly to Israel, I would lose no time in buying them there. Now the significance is that the Arabic reading public in Israel will not be able to enjoy the best literature,” he said.

After a year long investigation, the Alberta Human Rights and Citizenship Commission has rejected (via) a disingenuous complaint by the Edmonton Council of Muslim Canadians against former Western Standard publisher Ezra Levant over his re-publication of the Danish Muhammad cartoons.

Yasmeen Nizam, a civil litigation lawyer in Edmonton and a director of the council of Muslim Canadians, aid the council decided to bring a human-rights complaint because, unlike criminal hate-speech prosecutions, the publisher’s intent doesn’t matter.

The Wall Street Journal (via) reports that Random House have pulled a historical novel by Sherry Jones about Aisha, the young wife of the prophet Muhammad after an American academic took exception to it.

The publisher bought The Jewel of Medina last year as part of a two book deal and an August 12th publication date was set. In April, looking for endorsements, Random House sent galleys to writers and scholars, including one Denise Spellberg, an associate professor of Islamic history at the University of Texas in Austin.

Spellberg, It should be noted, is not a Muslim. But she decided to take offence on behalf of Muslims and called Shahed Amanullah, the editor of a popular Muslim web site.

After he got the call from Ms. Spellberg, Mr. Amanullah dashed off an email to a listserv of Middle East and Islamic studies graduate students, acknowledging he didn’t “know anything about it [the book],” but telling them, “Just got a frantic call from a professor who got an advance copy of the forthcoming novel, ‘Jewel of Medina’ — she said she found it incredibly offensive.” He added a write-up about the book from the Publishers Marketplace, an industry publication.

The next day, a blogger known as Shahid Pradhan posted Mr. Amanullah’s email on a Web site for Shiite Muslims — “Hussaini Youth” — under a headline, “upcoming book, ‘Jewel of Medina’: A new attempt to slander the Prophet of Islam.” Two hours and 28 minutes after that, another person by the name of Ali Hemani proposed a seven-point strategy to ensure “the writer withdraws this book from the stores and apologise all the muslims across the world.”

Spellberg also called Jane Garrett, an editor at Random House’s Knopf imprint (with whom she has a contract to write “Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an”). Ms. Garrett recorded the results of the conversation in an email on May 1st to Knopf executives.

“She thinks there is a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence,” Ms. Garrett wrote. “Denise says it is ‘a declaration of war . . . explosive stuff . . . a national security issue.’ Thinks it will be far more controversial than the satanic verses and the Danish cartoons. Does not know if the author and Ballantine folks are clueless or calculating, but thinks the book should be withdrawn ASAP.” (”The Jewel of Medina” was to be published by Random House’s Ballantine Books.) That day, the email spread like wildfire through Random House, which also received a letter from Ms. Spellberg and her attorney, saying she would sue the publisher if her name was associated with the novel. On May 2, a Ballantine editor told Ms. Jones’s agent the company decided to possibly postpone publication of the book.

On a May 21 conference call, Random House executive Elizabeth McGuire told the author and her agent that the publishing house had decided to indefinitely postpone publication of the novel for “fear of a possible terrorist threat from extremist Muslims” and concern for “the safety and security of the Random House building and employees.”

Sherry Jones has signed a termination agreement with Random House so her literary agent is able to seek another publisher.

In July I mentioned that he lower house of parliament in Belarus has approved a new bill that would change registration procedures for the traditional media and extend them to online media as well, forcing all web pages to be registered. On Tuesday the law was approved (via) by President Lukashenko.

The law stipulates that online content will now be subject to the same restrictions as the print press. The law also places greater power in the hands of the state authorities, who will be able to suspend or close indefinitely media outlets that publish material that does ‘not correspond to reality’, publish inaccurate or defamatory material or threaten the interests of the state or the public. It also gives state authorities the ability to interpret these terms as they deem fit.

After blocking access to YouTube for the past three months, Turkish authorities have now turned their attention (via) on the Paris based Dailymotion.

Transport minister Binali Yildirim said YouTube was still blocked because those responsible for the site refused to cooperate with the Internet regulatory authority, Internet Iletisim Baskanligi, an offshoot of the Telecommunications Council that was founded in November 2007.

“The conditions imposed on YouTube are arbitrary and show that the authorities want to control the Internet and those who create it,” Reporters Without Borders said. “If a site has a local representation, it makes it easier for the Turkish judicial authorities to enforce the sanctions they are fond of imposing. This is unacceptable.”

A committee of MPs has set out to start a moral panic over sites such as YouTube and Flickr that allow users to upload their own content.

A Culture, Media and Sport select committee believes a new industry body - likely to be known as the child internet safety council - should be set up to monitor the internet and attempt to protect children from “harmful content”.

More controversially – and less realistically – the committee also said it should be “standard practice” for sites hosting user-generated content to review material proactively.

This would mean that every one of the hundreds of thousands of videos, pictures and even blog comments and forum posts put up on UK sites on a daily basis would have to be checked before publication, rather than the current passive system where only videos that attract complaints are monitored.

The committee acknowledged that the volume of content on sites such as YouTube - which has 10 hours of videos uploaded every minute - made it unrealistic to watch every video before it went online.

But Something Must Be Done!

The committee stopped short of demanding mandatory regulation, but does “expect providers of all Internet services based upon user participation to move towards these standards without delay.”

Mars has pulled a UK TV ad for Snickers featuring Mr T harassing a speed walker for being a “disgrace to the man race” after an American gay rights group called the Human Rights Campaign (HRC) complained that it was “offensive to gay people”.

The advert makes no reference to the speed walkers sexual orientation. So it’s a little presumptuous – to say the least – for the HRC to assume that all speed walkers are gay. It’s utterly ridiculous, of course, for them to then take offence at their own imaginations.

Najam Sethi, chief editor of Pakistan’s Daily Times, has received death threats (via) from militant group the Islamic Taliban Movement after publishing a cartoon in one of the paper’s sister publications, Aaj Kal.

The cartoon depicted Umme Hassan, the principal of a radical women’s madrassa, calling for female students to wage violent jihad. Hassan is the wife of Abdul Aziz, the prayer leader of the Red Mosque in Islamabad, who was jailed after the mosque was stormed by Pakistani troops last year. The madrassa she headed was demolished in the operation in which more than 100 people, including 11 soldiers, were killed.

Other clerics of the Red Mosque argued that since Ms Hassan was teaching the Koran to her students in the mosque, any attempt to belittle her was blasphemous.

The threat followed a demonstration in Lahore last week during which Hassan called the cartoon blasphemous. Security officials said that the threat was serious as soldiers involved in the raid on the Red Mosque had been the target of suicide attacks.

A tabloid newspaper in China has been withdrawn from news stands after publishing a photo from the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre.

The photo - of two wounded young men being taken away on a rickshaw - was carried in Thursday’s Beijing News.

The picture was simply captioned “The Wounded”, and no mention of the protests was made in the text.

But observers suggest newspaper staff could face further punishment for broaching what remains a taboo subject.

Up to 3000 people are thought to have been killed when China’s ruling Communist Party sent in soldiers to pit down student pro-democracy protests in June 1989. Not surprisingly, they still don’t like being reminded of this.

The photograph was printed alongside an interview with the Hong Kong-born American photographer Liu Xiangcheng as an example of his work and it seems likely that the use of this particular picture was a mistake by staff who didn’t realise its. Significance.

As soon as Chinese officials noticed, they ordered the removal of the paper from the news-stands and part of its website was blocked.

Last year the authorities sacked three editors on a provincial newspaper for printing an advert praising the mothers of the Tiananmen victims for their campaign for justice.