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Archive for the ‘cartoons’ Category

Translator fined over child porn cartoons – The Local

Published: 25 Jul 10 11:14 CET
Online: http://www.thelocal.se/27984/20100725/

A Swedish translator of Japanese manga comics has been fined by Uppsala district court for possession of drawings depicting children engaged in sexual acts.

The ruling is the first of its kind in Sweden and has sparked a heated debate over children’s rights and censorship.

The translator at the centre of the case was found guilty of possessing child pornography after downloading the offending manga images from the internet. He told the court that he had retrieved the 51 pictures in order to stay up to date with the latest developments in the Japanese comic genre.

Judge Nils Pålbrant conceded that the decision to fine the translator, though unanimous, had raised a number of thorny issues.

‘There’s a clear conflict between freedom of speech on the one hand and general regulations regarding children’s rights on the other,’ he told local newspaper Upsala Nya Tidning.

‘It was however our view that the protective aspect weighed more heavily when taking into account the intentions of the legislator. The aim of the law, as described in the preliminary work that led to its creation, is not just to protect individual children but children in general.’

But the case has polarized opinion in Sweden. In an editorial published on Thursday, tabloid Expressen gave its backing to the translator.

‘However unpleasant and nasty a work of fiction might be, and whatever one thinks about Japanese porn involving cartoon children, there is actually no victim here. The children in the Uppland man’s manga comics were not molested since they were characters in a comic.’

The translator’s lawyer, Leif Silbersky, expressed surprise at the June 30th ruling and has lodged a formal appeal on behalf of his client.

‘It goes against all common sense. These are just drawings; no children have been harmed,’ he told Upsala Nya Tidning.

Judge Pålbrant said he too would welcome a second opinion from the Court of Appeal due to the precedential nature of the case.

Pak blockage of Facebook, YouTube might increase traffic to these sites-Internet-Infotech-The Economic Times:

21 May 2010, 1613 hrs IS, AGENCIES

ISLAMABAD: Pakistan’s blockage on wildly popular web-sites like YouTube and Facebook will likely have a reverse effect from the one desired by authorities as curious Netizens would log onto these sites to see what the brouhaha is about.

Pakistan’s telecom regulatory body, Pakistan Telecommunication Authority (PTA) has said it found ’sacrilegious’ content on YouTube, leading them to block it. Incidentally, YouTube has been co-founded by Jawed Karim, a Muslim.

‘We have asked the Internet service providers to block more than 450 web links, which contain derogatory material,’ The News quoted a PTA spokesman, as saying.

‘The action follows our repeated attempts to convince these websites to discard such material,’ he added.

He said the PTA had approached the administrators of the websites through emails, however he could not name the officials who had been contacted.

Industry officials, on the other hand, say the authorities have yet to get in touch with the people who run Facebook and YouTube, the report said.

These hasty suppressive tactics are probably not going to be too fruitful, according to industry officials.

‘There is no way of stopping this. The day government lifts restriction from these websites, the Internet traffic will double. People will visit them just out of curiosity,’ said an advertiser, who deals with Facebook and YouTube.

Saudi blocks controversial Facebook page: paper: “Saudi blocks controversial Facebook page: paper
English.news.cn 2010-05-21 20:52:46 FeedbackPrintRSS

RIYADH, May 21 (Xinhua) — Saudi Arabia has blocked a controversial page of the social networking website Facebook that ridicules an Islamic ban on depicting Islam’s prophet Muhammad, local Arab News reported Friday.

The kingdom’s Communications and Information Technology Commission (CITC) blocked the page that marked May 20 as ‘ Everybody Draw Muhammad Day,’ the paper said.

According to the report, Facebook as well as groups protesting the page and calling for a boycott of the website that remains accessible in the kingdom.

The ‘Everybody Draw Muhammad Day’ page was based on a cartoon by U.S. illustrator Molly Norris, which called for the designation of May 20 to ‘water down the pool of targets’ by having people draw their own images.

The page encouraged users to post images of the Islamic prophet to protest threats against producers of popular show ‘South Park’ for an offensive depiction of the prophet during an episode last year.

Norris, however, issued an apology and said in an interview that she is against her cartoon ‘becoming a reality.’ She even posted a link to the ‘Against Everybody Draw Muhammad Day’ Facebook page on her webpage.

The page drew outrage form millions of Muslims across the world, with Pakistan temporarily blocking the popular social network over the page. The government took the action after a group of lawyers won a court order on Wednesday requiring officials to block Facebook until May 31.”

(Via .)

AFP: Pakistanis shout ‘Death to Facebook’, burn US flags: “Pakistanis shout ‘Death to Facebook’, burn US flags

By Hasan Mansoor (AFP) – 6 hours ago

KARACHI — Pakistani protesters shouted ‘Death to Facebook’, ‘Death to America’ and burnt US flags on Friday, venting growing anger over ’sacrilegious’ caricatures of the Prophet Mohammed on the Internet.

A Facebook user organised an ‘Everyone Draw Mohammed Day’ competition to promote ‘freedom of expression’, inspired by an American woman cartoonist, but sparked a major backlash in the conservative Muslim country of 170 million.

Islam strictly prohibits the depiction of any prophet as blasphemous and the row has sparked comparison with protests across the Muslim world over the publication of satirical cartoons of Mohammed in European newspapers in 2006.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) banned access to Facebook, YouTube and more than 450 links, including restricted access to Wikipedia in view of what it called ‘growing sacrilegious content’.

PTA released a toll-free telephone number and email address, and has acted on complaints received by the regulator.

In Karachi, Pakistan’s biggest city, religious parties mobilised hundreds of protesters onto the streets to demand a ban on Facebook and an apology from the social networking site for humiliating Muslims.

Activists shouted slogans such as ‘Death to Facebook’, ‘Death to America’ and branded the United States the ‘root cause of all mischief’ at the peaceful rallies, said an AFP reporter.

In Multan, a shrine city in Punjab province, hundreds of people rallied, burning US flags and tyres to block traffic before dispersing peacefully.

In the northwestern city of Peshawar, about 250 students and religious activists staged small protests, chanting ‘Death to Facebook, death to Youtube,’ and on one occasion torched a US flag, an AFP reporter said.

The offending Facebook page has attracted 105,000 fans — and five pages of crude manipulated pictures and caricatures. Pages denouncing the competition and calling for a boycott of the May 20 competition attracted far more fans.

Facebook expressed disappointment at being blocked and said it was considering whether to make the offending page inaccessible in Pakistan.

YouTube, the Google-owned video-sharing site, said it was ‘working to ensure that the service is restored as soon as possible’.

The controversy has yet to incite a mass outpouring onto the streets in Pakistan, where there are an estimated 2.5 million Facebook users, and it remains to be seen how far protests will spread to other Muslim countries.

Sweden said it has closed its embassy in Islamabad for more than two weeks due to the security situation, refusing to say whether any direct threats had been issued against the mission.

An Al-Qaeda front organisation has offered 100,000 dollars to anyone who kills Swedish artist Lars Vilks, who has angered many Muslims by drawing highly blasphemous caricature of the prophet.

Pakistan condemned the caricatures on Facebook and said that ’such malicious and insulting attacks hurt the feelings of Muslims around the world’.

The PTA asked Facebook and YouTube, which are wildly popular in Pakistan and set up in the United States, to resolve the matter as soon as possible in a manner that ‘ensures religious harmony and respect’.

The purported creator of the Facebook page told a US television channel in a voice-only interview that he had meant to stand up for ‘freedom of expression’.

‘We know that the fight for freedom of expression, freedom of speech can’t be stopped by a country like Pakistan censoring the Internet,’ the man, who would be identified only as ‘Andy’, told MSNBC.

A rival Facebook page called ‘Against Everybody Draw Mohammed Day’ started to oppose the caricature page had drawn some 106,300 fans.

Molly Norris, the American cartoonist whose work inspired the controversial page, condemned the Facebook spin-off and apologised to Muslims.

She drew a cartoon in April to protest against the cancellation of an episode of popular show ‘South Park’. Norris satirically proposed May 20 as an ‘Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.’

‘The vitriol this ‘day’ has brought out, of people who only want to draw obscene images, is offensive to Muslims who did nothing to endanger our right to expression in the first place,’ she said.

Cartoon Law goes live: “

Time to burn your Japanese comics

If you happen to possess any cartoon images on your hard drive – or on your bookshelf – that just might depict children involved in or present at a sexual act, then you should probably have deleted them already.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Cartoon smut law to make life sucky for Olympic organisers: “

Internet + iffy logo = Ha ha!

Government zeal in pursuing anyone suspected of harbouring paedophilic tendencies may shortly rebound – with unintended consequences for the 2012 Olympic logo.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

Put down your pens: Cartoons next on censor block: “

Transatlantic campaign mounts against scribbled smut

Comment Proposals to make it a criminal offence to possess cartoons depicting certain forms of child abuse are heading back to the House of Commons, and elsewhere in the UK and across the atlantic, it’s becoming clear there is an appetite in certain quarters for a much wider clampdown on freedom of expression.…

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(Via The Register – Public Sector.)

YouTube – UK Government plans to criminalise Japanese Anime/Manga fans

The UK Government is planning to outlaw mere possesion of cartoon images that appear sexually explicit IF the persons in them APPEAR to be under 18. How do you tell the age of a cartoon character?…

Could you get arrested for owning a graphic novel? | Coffee House

Wednesday, 28th January 2009
Could you get arrested for owning a graphic novel?
William Blackstock 5:27pm

Film adaptations of graphic novels such as Zack Snyder’s 300 and the upcoming Watchmen mean that graphic novels are growing ever more popular. They’re not just in dingy comic book shops anymore but on the shelves in Waterstones and Borders. So is it right that they are now under threat by government anti-pornography legislation?

There are two bills in parliament at the moment that, if successful, could make the possession of ‘extreme pornographic images’ an offence.

An ‘extreme image’ is defined in The Criminal Justice and Immigration Act as one that is ‘grossly offensive, disgusting or otherwise of an obscene character’. So far, so good, right? That all sounds normal enough, but there¹s a sting in the tail for unsuspecting readers of the graphic novel: ‘and a reasonable person looking at the image would think that any such person or animal was real.’ There¹s a similar set of rules for child pornography. So, in a nutshell, if it looks like it¹s real (i.e. it¹s well drawn), then you can be prosecuted for owning it.

Fans of Frank Miller’s Sin City probably have little to fear; his stark high-contrast black and white panels are explicitly violent yet a far cry from ‘realistic’. If, on the other hand, you prefer Alan Moore¹s Lost Girls or even Neil Gaiman¹s Sandman, you may be in for a shock. In an interview with MTV here, Gaiman said (of the similar US PROTECT Act):

‘I wrote a story about a serial killer who kidnaps and rapes children, and then murders them, we did that as a comic, not for the purposes of titillation or anything like that, but if you bought that comic, you could be arrested for it? That¹s just deeply wrong. Nobody was hurt. The only thing that was hurt were ideas.’

I¹ve read the story and it¹s not as explicit as Sin City; is written extremely well; and, even more important than that, is necessary in order to understand the world of Sandman.

Works like Lost Girls really blur the line. Alan Moore¹s story of Alice (from Alice in Wonderland), Wendy (from Peter Pan) and Dorothy (from The Wizard of Oz) talking together of their sexual exploits as adults in 1913 is filled with rich, beautiful language and wonderfully illustrated by Melinda Gebbie but it is erotic in content (Moore himself goes further, saying deliberately that it is ‘pornography’ and rejecting the ‘erotica’ label). It is also, in places, quite uncomfortable to read. But then a huge part of the point of literature, erotic or otherwise, is to challenge our expectations of what is acceptable and what is not.

For the government to step in and say what we can and cannot own, to define the morality of art in that way, is both ludicrous and impossible; especially when it concerns entirely fictional situations with equally fictional artwork.

And where will it all end? If Alan Moore can be censored, then why not Angela Carter or James Joyce in a few bills’ time? Why not Renaissance art? Much better, I think, to let the individual choose what they want to see or read and to censor things for themselves.

Chaotic Coroners and Justice Bill reels into view

Net suicides, gay rights, data transfer – it’s all here

Comment While the question of whether cartoon images of children should fall foul of the law has aroused debate, the recently published Coroners and Justice Bill contains more than a few changes that may prove just as controversial.…

(Via The Register – Public Sector.)