News More Censorship from AT&T
posted by on August 14 at 0:15 AM
AT&T claimed the Pearl Jam censorship incident was a one-time gaffe by a bad apple in its webcast production crew. “An isolated incident.”
Not so, say fans of the Flaming Lips and the John Butler Trio.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports:
But yesterday, a reader e-mailed the Sun-Times saying AT&T’s Blue Room Webcast also had silenced comments during two performances at the Bonnaroo Festival in Tennessee last June, cutting remarks by the John Butler Trio bemoaning the lack of federal response to Hurricane Katrina and comments about Bush and the war in Iraq by singer Wayne Coyne of the Flaming Lips.“The sound did not cut out at any other time — only when someone was talking about George Bush or the government in a negative way,” the reader, who identified herself as Andrea K., wrote. Flaming Lips management said the band was unaware of the edit but was investigating, and the John Butler Trio could not be reached.
Courtesy of Public Knowledge.
http://www.mctague.org/carl/music/computer/pieces/ii-V-I7/
^i finally got around to downloading this piece. it was featured as an interlude, in its entirety, of a radio program discussing the discourse of racial poetry occuring in 1980s Arizona, via the religious custom of "diaper" analogy.
ms. k, i feel the appopriation of hereby following terms ar not a critique.
gzip’d postscript (recommended) (204K)
postscript (2MB)
pdf (some symbols look coarsely pixelated on screen, but print nicely nevertheless) (459K)
mp3 (10MB)
ogg (9MB)
flac (lossless) (49MB)
gzip’d cmix score (318K
gzip’d lilypond input (10K)
Public scrutiny hasn't deemed, to my knowledge, the policy of your reaction as not-so-bright.
Good old, AT&T...how's that i-phone??...I wonder how much money they contributed and lobbying they did to get Bush's revision to FISA passed by Congress.
Nothing makes politicians ignore their constituents faster than corporations.
Democrat? Republican? Corporate!!
The third party that always wins.
When I was a kid, it was the USSR that we were afraid of. Now we're afraid of our own country. I'm sickened.
A painful first post of the day, Josh.
I'm going to do something frothy now -- like listen to a Bernadette Peters record -- to get the taste of this out of my mouth.
This story came out on Friday; I wonder if anyone's been able to locate the John Butler Trio since then.
@3
The USSR still exists. It's Minnesota and Wisconsin, aka: Minnesconsin. The tundra should be kicked out of our country. Immediately.
Wired contact AT&T and actually got them to admit that it had indeed happened multiple times in the past.
Really? Is there really not more important news to discuss?
Is anyone surprised that a private company that is hosting music clips for consumers would want to edit out anything that might offend some of those consumers?
Don't you think it would be a stupid business decision if companies didn't take such actions?
Especially when the self-censorship has little to do with the actual material being provided? In other words, are these censored statements relevant to the music clip being hosted?
If you have AT&T do your webcast, you play by their rules. Corporate rock still sucks.
It's time to insist on our free speech rights, even if we need to use our second amendment rights to do it.
@9: Right. Because we all have the constitutional right to have AT&T broadcast whatever we want to say over the internet. Maybe before resorting to the second amendment, we should actually read the first.
5:
I'm currently sitting in the library in St. Paul Minnesota. This is not the USSR. Jesus, the Twin Cities are just as (if not more) liberal as Seattle. Wisconsin... well, I'm not a fan, but mainly because it all sucks except for Tommy Bartlett's Robot World & Water Ski Show.
@10: This is relevant because currently in the Net Neutrality debate, AT&T and others are insisting that it's unnecessary because they would never censor or restrict traffic and we should just trust them.
This is just another piece of evidence that they cannot, in fact, be trusted. With fewer and fewer companies controlling internet infrastructure, we need the government to step in and protect free expression.
@12: Yes, I understand the issue. I think there are plenty of convincing reasons for governments to ensure net neutrality. But I don't think the first amendment is one of them.
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