ROMANCE IS THE NEW PORN

[defrog]

ITEM [via trillsie ]: Author Elizabeth Donald tells the one about how she set up a web store to help small-press authors sell books, and decides to use ProPay to handle credit-card payments.

ProPay refuses to do business with her on the grounds that her business constitutes “unacceptable use” as a pornographic merchant.

In fact, Donald’s web site specializes in horror, science fiction, fantasy and romance – sometimes in the same book (Donald, for example, has written vampire romance novels). No porn by any stretch of the imagination. However, some of the romance bits are apparently not exclusively heterosexual.

That doesn’t make it porn, of course. Unless you live in Utah. Which, by what I’m sure is a coincidence, is where ProPay is based.

Granted, as a private business, ProPay can choose to do business with whoever it wants for whatever reason. And of course that sword cuts both ways – customers who aren’t freaked out over the homosex can choose not to do business with ProPay.

But I’m passing this on anyway because it’s worth knowing that this is how censorship works in the Internet Age – play the Porn Card, and you can justify blocking access to just about anything. Pick any existing or proposed Internet content censorship law in any country – including the US – and you’ll find porn specifically mentioned as one of the justifications for it, and the law is almost always worded in a way to ensure that you can ban a lot more than just “porn”.

To be fair, some may specifically single out child porn, which is illegal in any form anyway. But as we’ve seen in Australia, “child porn” can include small-breasted women. And as we’re now seeing in Europe, the music/film industry is considering using “child porn” as a shoehorn to passing laws cracking down on copyright infringement.

Listen to Johan Schlüter from the Danish Anti-Piracy Group, a lobby organization for the music and film industry associations:

”Child pornography is great,” the speaker at the podium declared enthusiastically. ”It is great because politicians understand child pornography. By playing that card, we can get them to act, and start blocking sites. And once they have done that, we can get them to start blocking file sharing sites”.

See what they did there?

Whatever it takes,

This is dF

Comments

[thelastaerie.livejournal.com]

well, there are lots of snobbery going on the publishing world, without these idiotic bigots blocking any gay sub-genre books going mainstream. Same level of explicity in hetero romance is acceptable, whereas GLBT ones will be turned away. On the positive side, Harlequin has recently set up a new branch to publish sub-genre romance ebooks, proves that the big players don't mind gayness when they can find money in it.