Again with the asshats I say.  And we have some wonderful hats of assness this time in the person(s) of a company known as Righthaven.  What is Righthaven, you ask?  It is a posse of out-of-control lawyers who Google on behalf of their clients’ IP rights, and if they catch someone doing something nefarious— such as quoting a paragraph with proper credit and linking back to the full article— then they sue your ass. I don’t mean they send you a nasty note, or a cease and desist, I mean they file paperwork at the court demanding $75K and you don’t find out until you get a subpoena.

How to fight this? Well, if you get sued, take their ass to court and don’t settle. Sure, it’s a pain in the ass, and expensive, but if everyone does this their whole scheme will collapse. Second, never ever ever link back to the assholes that hire these people. they don’t deserve the traffic, and a trackback may get you sued.

Of course, that’s not how they characterize it.

Again, we have more proposed legislation to protect the children. Which begs the question why say this, “with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress to a person” instead of  “with the intent to coerce, intimidate, harass or cause substantial emotional distress directed at a minor child.” Is this hard? Almost as if they want to leave the door open to prosecute such comments directed at anyone.  And a note on the language that’s really troubling, there’s nothing that says that the bullying has to be targeted at a particular person. Under this, if you intend to cause substantial emotional distress to some group (say Scientologists, to pick a random group that would never ever abuse a bad law to intimidate its critics) you’re breaking the law.

I got into a semi-heated discussion with a friend on Facebook who thought I was trivializing the problem this legislation is supposed to address by saying, in my snarky fashion, that this was a blatant power-grab by Congress to attempt to give the government the power to throw a chilling blanket over the raging fail-fire that is the interwebs. Problem is, way too many people think that way and support legislation based only on its stated intent. This includes the asshats in Congress. Especially the asshats in Congress.

So my asshat today is Rep. Linda Sanchez, not because she wants to deal with cyberbulling, but because that by supporting legislation like this she is one of three things: 1) She’s too stupid to recognize the unfortunate implications of such poorly-worded law. 2) She’s too cynical to let any legislation that purports to help the children (regardless of actual content) pass by without her fingerprints all over it. 3) She is intentionally using a tragic event as a pretext to slip in a unconstitutional power-grab by the state.

ADDENDUM #3: Amazon seems to be trying to fix this on the down low.  No press comments, nothing on their site, but a little experimentation shows that rankings are re-appearing.  MZB’s book from below has its rank back, as does Heather has Two Mommies. The History of Sexuality by Foucault is still SOL.

ADDENDUM #2: And Dear Author points out something that very strongly implies that whatever is happening at Amazon is happening on their own servers.

ADDENDUM: A very interesting theory brought to my attention by a tweet from Toby.  Brings up other possibilities.  Could Amazon have been the target of a botnet?

Again, we have an example why is it a really bad thing to have centralized distribution channels, either state or corporate.  I pointed this out earlier with some e-book censoring going on with Apple’s iPhone application store. Well, I can’t say I’m surprised, but Amazon has decided to follow suit, and in a much more egregious fashion. They’ve decided that if your book is “adult” enough, well, they’ll just nuke the Amazon Rank for the title and make it impossible to find via search. Quoth one amazonian asshat:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Give me a fucking break. Do you have any fucking idea what happens when you type “dildo” into the search bar on Amazon? Something a tad more offensive than a book title and description. Then there’s “sex toy“, yeah that’s way less of an affront than a plot description of a Marion Zimmer Bradly novel. It is so awesome to know that Amazon is protecting us from these kind of evil search results. (Warning: all the links to Amazon here, except the MZB one, very very NSFW.)

This has leapt past hypocritical and into the completely asinine. This is an obvious attempt to suppress just one kind of literature, (romance and erotica, especially gay romance and erotica) in one particular medium (i.e. Books), with some pathetic rationale that falls apart when the SAME SITE SELLS HARD PORN DVD’s AND ANATOMICALLY CORRECT VIBRATORS.

Obviously, I’m not the only person who thinks this way. And, people are already compiling a list of the affected authors.  (A list that incudes such people as Quintin Crisp, Anne Rice,  and titles such as Who’s Who in Gay and Lesbian History.)

Or, more precisely, he tries to.

Apparently his book violates the SDK agreement Apple imposes on developers for the iPhone.  “Objectionable content,” quoth Apple.  In the end, Mr. Carnoy wants the book on the iPhone badly enough that he edits out the objectionable content.   Yes, you read that correctly.  Apple wants to dictate what’s in the media played on their devices.  This means we all better hope that iTunes always has competition, otherwise you’re going to have Apple lawyers re-writing song lyrics.

Now, since then, Sherry Jones has found other publishers for The Jewel of Medina and you know what? Those stupid radical Islamists don’t even have the decency to show up at a book singing. In fact, far from Spellberg’s alarmist apocalyptic prophesies that the publishers of such an evil inflammatory tome were in dire danger for their lives, the worst thing to happen to anyone because of this book was a mailbox fire in the UK and a couple of bad reviews

I said that, at best, Professor Spellberg’s reaction was disingenuous bigotry. After being so wrong, and wrong in such a stereotypical OMG TERROIZT!!! way, I think her employer should review her credentials. I mean this woman’s degreed in Islamic studies? Really?

(Thanks to the Smart Bitches for reminding me of this story.)

Random House was going to publish a book titled The Jewel of Medina by Sherry Jones, a historical novel that features one of Mohammad’s wives, and has decided “oops, bad idea.” Quoth Random House in the Washington Post Op-Ed, “after sending out advance copies of the novel, the company received “from credible and unrelated sources, cautionary advice not only that the publication of this book might be offensive to some in the Muslim community, but also that it could incite acts of violence by a small, radical segment.”

Apparently one of those credible sources was an American academic named Denise Spellberg (sage advice from the Smart Bitches, do not let this woman blurb your book) who got an advance copy and apparently got her knickers in a prudish little twist (you see Muhammad had wives, and gasp, may have had sex with them) and made a “frantic” call to the editor of a popular Muslim website (this book made her frantic) and asked him to warn Muslims about this nasty, evil, book that “made fun of Muslims and their history.” And apparently, armed only with Spellberg’s description of this “very ugly, stupid piece of work,” not having read it himself, he did exactly what she asked, warning people of the coming literary apocalypse. And, of course, offense spreads like wildfire.

But what seems to be the trigger that caused the book to be pulled was Spellberg’s own warning to her own editor at another imprint at Random House. According to Spellberg, if the book was released there was “a very real possibility of major danger for the building and staff and widespread violence.” Apparently she babbled on like an islamaphobic neocon frightened by Obama’s middle name. The Terrorists would kill them all if the book saw the light of day. Her warning was bounced around the email servers at Random House until the book was pulled less than a month later.

Spellberg might count Random House’s withdrawl of the book as some sort of victory, but I wonder if she realizes that encouraging them to stomp this book by using threats of violence is casting Islam in a much more vile light before a much broader audience than the book’s publication ever would have.