What about pirated porn?

I was struck by the juxtaposition of these two news stories the other day.
From TorrentFreak:

During the past 12 months the U.S. Government seized more than 100 domain names it claimed were promoting copyright infringement. But this was just the beginning. The domain seizures pale in comparison to a bill that’s about to be introduced by U.S. lawmakers.

Dubbed the PROTECT IP Act, the bill will introduce a wide-scale of censorship tools authorities and copyright holders can use to quash websites they claim are facilitating copyright infringement. It is basically a revamped and worsened version of the controversial COICA proposal which had to be resubmitted after its enaction failed last year.

You can read more about this at Techdirt. On the other hand is this article from Fox News:

New Yorkers can watch internet porn at the city's public libraries thanks to a policy of free speech protected by the First Amendment, the New York Post reported Monday.

"Customers can watch whatever they want on the computer," said Brooklyn Public Library spokeswoman Malika Granville, describing the anything-goes philosophy that is the rule at the city's 200-plus branches.

On the one hand, we are cracking down on those who would steal a $0.99 song. On the other, we are cracking down on libraries that restrict pornography viewing in public. I'm surely not advocating piracy, but let's get our priorities straight. Of course, this library policy is even more bizarre in the face of this article from Entertainment Weekly:

NewSouth Books’ upcoming edition of Mark Twain’s seminal novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn will remove all instances of the “n” word—I’ll give you a hint, it’s not nonesuch—present in the text and replace it with slave. The new book will also remove usage of the word Injun. The effort is spearheaded by Twain expert Alan Gribben, who says his PC-ified version is not an attempt to neuter the classic but rather to update it. “Race matters in these books,” Gribben told PW. “It’s a matter of how you express that in the 21st century.”

So we will censor sites that are accused of having copyrighted content shut down, but not those that exploit young men and women for sexual purposes. We can protect out kids from words like "injun", but we can't protect them from seeing and hearing pornography.

The question becomes, looking back in 1000 years, will this be the year that historians decide was the year the US jumped the shark?

Posted in: censorship,morality,Politics