Anyone heard anything on this one?

[thehefner]

Caught this from someone on Peter David's blog:

"In an apparent reversal of decades of U.S. practice, recent federal Office of Foreign Assets Control regulations bar American companies from publishing works by dissident writers in countries under sanction unless they first obtain U.S. government approval.

The restriction, condemned by critics as a violation of the First Amendment, means that books and other works banned by some totalitarian regimes cannot be published freely in the United States, a country that prides itself as the international beacon of free expression.

That means everything from "Reading Lolita in Tehran" to "Dr. Zhivago" would have been ILLEGAL to read in the U.S."

Comments

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

I couldn't find the original post, so I can't tell if he posted the memo. I wasn't able to find any mention of it on the OFAC site. I haven't heard of it otherwise, so I can't really comment.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

It was posted underneath the one about the United Church of Christ commercial, but by someone else, not by David. That's pretty much the entire post, so yeah, I dunno.

[surrealname.livejournal.com]

SNARL!

DAVE SMASH PUNY CENSORSHIP LAWS!

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

I did some more research. It's comparatively old news, from late October. Basically, the Berman Amendment and Free Trade In Ideas Amendment say that books and such are exempted from trade embargoes, but the Treasury Department doesn't see it that way. They claim that it applies only to pre-existing works.

It's been that way for 15 years, but now it's happening to the 2003 Nobel Prize winner in literature, so she's suing. We'll see what the court has to say. I could track down the actual text of the amdentments but that would be work.

[tompurdue.livejournal.com]

And it appears that the Treasury Department may be right. Code of Federal Regulations, Title 31, Subtitle B, Chapter V, Section 560.210, paragraph (c)2 says:

This section does not exempt from regulation or authorize
transactions related to information and informational materials not fully created and in existence at the date of the transactions, or to the substantive or artistic alteration or enhancement of informational materials, or to the provision of marketing and business consulting services.

So it's Congress' fault. The Treasury Department is just following the law.

But not that it's the "transactions" being regulated, not the materials. What it means is that you can't pay somebody in an embargoed country to write a book. Boris Pasternak is free to write it, and you're free to publish it, but you can't hire people from enemy countries to write stuff, even if it's opposing the bad guys.

So ultimately I'd claim the issue isn't censorship, it's money. You can publish anything you like, but you can't transfer money to the bad guys (even if the bad guys are good guys). The court may go so far as to say that the transfer of money in the cause of speech is a speech issue; that's how campaign finance laws keep getting struck down.

Gotta go to the primary sources on this stuff. "I read it on the Internet" is for pussies.

[thehefner.livejournal.com]

Ok, thanks for the research, man!