Clean Reader

[rowyn]

This subject came up on Twitter this morning. I tweeted about it a bit myself, but Twitter is not a great place for talking about complex subjects.

There are some questions about whether the Clean Reader app works as it says it does. For the sake of discussion, I will assume that it does what it claims: take an uncensored ebook that the user legally owns and display that ebook to the user with the obscenities censored out. The censorship settings are a changeable toggle: the user can opt to uncensor the ebook at any time. The app doesn't change the ebook, nor does it sell users altered ebooks. It has the option to alter the display of purchased copies.

I have no personal use for this product. I do not think obscenities are a wonderful thing that enriches language, but I don't find them all that offensive, either. I'd rather read the book the author wrote than a bowlderized version.

However, I have great sympathy for those who do find obscenities and profanities offensive. I rarely use them in my own writing in part because of this. If someone chooses to buy a book and then black out all the bad words in their personal, legally-owned copy, that seems perfectly reasonable to me. If they want to buy an app to do the same thing for them automatically: fine. I may find this a bit silly, and I don't want to read their copy, but it has no effect on me. The copyright holder still gets paid. The app is not charging for a derivative work. It's all good. I feel like this falls, correctly, under "fair use".

But there are some interesting hypothetical cases around the same concept. For example:

* An app that censors based on content, removing homosexual characters or minorities, altering religions, etc.: I would not think well of anyone who used such an app, but if it's only for their personal legally-owned copy, I'd still call it fair use. Only a twit would use it. But twits have rights too.

* A school board that orders all the school library books censored via app: This school board needs to be recalled. But the point of failure is the school board, and not the existence of the app. I am not sure I'd go so far as to say "libraries should not be allowed to lend copies of bowlderized books", but I wouldn't be upset if a law prohibited libraries from censoring their legally-owned copies of books, either. Lending out a book you've altered strikes me as different in a meaningful way from altering one you only intend to read yourself.

* Similarly, I think that selling censored books is also on different legal ground: that even if you own a copy of a book, you are not necessarily allowed to alter it any way that you like and re-sell your copy. (I think this gets into "derivative works".) But I'm not sure of the legal grounds here. Legal or not, it's ethically dubious at best.

That's all I can think of for now. What do you think of this issue?

Comments

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

I think we're pretty much on the same page. Changing the book while it is displayed, not actually altering the file, seems completely unobjectionable to me.I'd prefer if there was some way to tell that that's what's happening at all times, to avoid cases of "We share a reader in the family and A switched on the filter and B read the book without knowing, and then got in trouble with C because they recommended the book to C as clean even though it had a lot of swearing", but that's about it.

[rowyn]

It sounds like it'd be pretty obvious when it came up, for this particular app, since it leaves blank spaces in place of the censored word. So "Cut that crap out" becomes "Cut that out", with a space you can touch to see a bowlderized replacement word. Rather than just replacing the word. You'd always be aware that a change had taken place.

[ankewehner.livejournal.com]

Sounds good to me, then.

[rowyn]

Which, come to think of it, strikes me as pretty important. You don't want to present someone else's words as the author's.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure it's not legal to alter and resell an author's work under copyright law at least. I think that counts for libraries too, or if it doesn't, it should, because it's being presented and misrepresented to the public at large. If it were something like a public reading or art installation, I think it'd be covered under derivative works since it's being presented as something else in its own right.

If there was an app that somehow could censor out homosexual relationships or racial representations on an ereader as voluntarily installed by the reader's owner, I think it'd be legal despite actually changing the story, as it's not a presentation of the material, but more like an interface option of the device itself. I also have no idea how an app would do that, but either way if a jackass wants to hate people, they don't need an app to do it, so they can have one that makes it snow swastikas down the page while they're reading for all I care. I'd be more bothered if they used this to present the work to their children, but again I don't have a right to interfere there.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Oh yeah, and the degree to which you alter a work to present as a derivative matters too, legally. It's kind of murky though, and I'm no expert. Intent is taken into consideration, so if someone's making an app to censor a work and trying to sell that as a derivative, it won't fly, but if someone is doing a parody by changing all the swearing to "waffles" then they can slide past, I think, even if it's dumb as hell.

[rowyn]

Satire and parody get more protection than most. For some good reasons, but still. It can be kinda crappy.

It does strike me as bad to change a text and present it as the original, like falsely attributing your words to another. Not an issue with the app per se, but I can definitely see how changing a purchased book and reselling it would be a problem.

And like you say, it sucks that people will censor what their kids can see, but all the alternatives are even worse. :| I'm glad my parents just let me read what I wanted.

[octantis.livejournal.com]

Yeah.. sadly, we can't outlaw the dumb. Which is a good thing, honestly, because I'd be in jail at some point. :D

I thought about this some more, and I think a more direct way of putting my view is like this...

It's about choice. The buyer has the right to 'consume' the content however they want to. Artists can try as hard as they can to convey what they intend, but in the end they don't control how someone interprets their work. If I write a super sad song and pour my heart and soul into it, and someone wants to listen to it at double speed because coked-up emo chipmunk is hilarious, nothing I can do about that.

It's a choice the consumer has to consciously make, though. If they want to censor a book for themselves, the app is just a tool to do that, the same as a bottle of wite-out would be.

This is distinct from presentation. A retailer or distributor is obliged to present the material unaltered. Presenting an alternative they censored themselves, even if they offer both versions, is NOT kosher. Even if they're offering a choice, the recipient choosing a censored alternative is different from the recipient consuming the content as altered by themselves, because the distributor has inserted themselves into the creative process. At the very least, the possibility (however remote) of a consumer finding and believing the altered material being presented is the original is enough to rule this out completely.

[alltoseek.livejournal.com]

I'd be OK with the app that blacks out obscenities. I think the app ought to list all words it considers obscenities, with the user option to add/remove. I'd also like to see the app leave in the initial letter, and black out the rest.

And I mean literally black out - not simply remove as if it were never there.

An app that tried to do more - that tried to erase certain characteristics of characters - I would object to as an author. That would no longer be the book I'd written. If you don't want gays in the books you read, or white people, or Buddhists, then just buy books without those kinds of characters.

In the famous example of Huckleberry Finn, I would be OK with a school assigning the book via an app that replaced the n word with "n-----", for example. The teacher would explain that the term is highly offensive today, so we're not requiring students to read that term. But we're not going to leave out anything about Finn's relationships with Jim, or Finn's attitude about it or his feelings towards Jim, or that Jim was black and a runaway slave. Nor are we leaving out/changing that Twain used a word that was offensive at the time (to a greater or lesser degree and sometimes the users were ignorant of how offensive) but that is now considered so offensive as to be inappropriate to include in required reading at school.

I have a friend who is seriously disturbed by the word "cunt". She could be reading something that is female- and woman- and sex-positive, and happens to use the word "cunt" in perhaps what it intends as a sexy way, and my friend would be thrown right out of the mood and the book just by that one word. So blacking it out could allow my friend to continue to enjoy the work.

Most ppl use obscenities out of laziness. They don't want to bother describing what they really mean. Most writers use them either to reflect the way ppl actually speak, or to provide the right tone for a sex scene (i.e. not clinical :-)

But a reader could want to read about ppl who curse all the time, but still not want to be subjected to hearing, or reading, all that cursing. So in the dialogue, there is all the cursing bleeped out for you. But you still get all the important stuff about the chars and the plot, and you still read all the bleeps where they were cursing (so you know these are ppl who curse a lot). You just don't have to fill your head with the actual cursing.

Same thing with highly offensive derogatory terms. I might want to read about neo-Nazis and skinheads and whatever, to find out where they're coming from, what's going on with them, but not be subjected to seeing over and over all the offensive terms they use for Jews - having my head get filled with that.

tl;dr: My main thing is that ppl know what words are being removed, and that they are being removed, and where they occurred (so readers are aware of the author's original intent), and why they are being removed.

[rowyn]

I actually find that censoring out words makes me more aware of them. I accidentally bought a "clean" version of a song once, and every time they have a silence where the censored word would go, I hear the word in my head. Listening to the uncensored version, I won't even notice when it goes past. It's weird.

Good points, re: wanting to know what's been censored, or changed.

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

I've only been bothered by the radio edits of songs when they're done badly.

How would you censor homosexuality automatically? I think that's beyond current AI. Maybe you could do it as a service? But then you're in the category where you're selling an altered version of the content which probably needs permission from the author.

A school library lending books on e-readers with profanities censored out seems... silly but exactly what you'd expect? The school board's customers are the overprotective parents, after all.

A lot of times when I'm reading books, I don't see race. In the Colbert sense where I fail to notice the hints the author inserted that people were of a different race. Hints like outright stating they're Chinese, or (the most embarrassing one) calling them 'dusky'.

...I thought she meant that the people in Earthsea had dark hair.

[rowyn]

... I read the Earthsea books when I was a kid. REPEATEDLY. I loved them.

And I never noticed the characters weren't white either. *facepalm*

I pay a lot more attention to character descriptions now. I remember there was a kerfluffle of people upset that one of the minor characters from the Hunger Games was being played by a black actress, and I was like "wasn't she described as being black in the books?" (She was.)

The weirdest for me was having a conversation with someone who had watched the entire "Avatar: the Last Airbender" series and somehow hadn't noticed that basically none of the characters were white. o.O

[terrycloth.livejournal.com]

That might have been me.

Oh no, wait, I didn't watch the entire series.

[haikujaguar.livejournal.com]

I don't care what people do with my books after they buy them, and I am sympathetic to people who are dealing with an often puerile belief that using obscenities is somehow adult or edgy. If they want to not have to look at that stuff, I completely understand. I don't, most times, either.

Here's an interesting observation about me, though: I'd rather not buy a book I'd have to censor to read, period. At least the authors being bought by people using clean reader are being BOUGHT by people who are willing to compromise in order to read (and feed) them. Unlike me, they're still paying the author. Me, I look at books full of obscenities and not only decline to feed that author, I often recommend other people not read them.

So you'd think authors would be excited about clean reader making them available to an audience that would otherwise never touch them. Instead I get all these "I CHOSE THIS WORD SPECIFICALLY I AM AN ARTIST YOU WILL EXPERIENCE ME THE WAY I DECREE" cries that sound like they came straight out of my fine arts college, which was full of elitist academics who were out of touch with reality and were fine with it, even if it meant their sole means of support was the hothouse of the ivory tower.

*shrug* I don't think I'm writing deathless prose. I don't think my work is going to be substantially altered if someone blanks out all the profanity (assuming I used any).

[rowyn]

I can kinda understand authors who don't want some filter's word choices attributed to them, especially when it's parents filtering for their kids, who may not understand that filtering is happening. I don't think there's anything authors can or should do about it, but I'm not entirely unsympathetic. Especially if filters eventually get smart enough to make more substanial changes to a work. :/

But Clean Reader in particular seems to make it pretty clear where it's changing the text, and the changes are word choice, not content, so ... yeah, I can't get too upset about it. I write on FlightRising, after all, which also filters out profanity, and it almost never bothers me that I can't have characters swear explicitly.

i've considered making a PG/R version of my own romance novel, by cutting out the explicit sex scenes, in fact. So even when i've written a scene that I think it important to the narrative, I don't consider it so sacred that *i* wouldn't change it, never mind letting some reader edit their own copy.

[archangelbeth]

So you'd think authors would be excited about clean reader making them available to an audience that would otherwise never touch them.

*jumps up and down* YES, THAT WOULD BE ME.

...except I don't think it could catch anything I did (*facepalm*), so really, it ought to allow people to "white-out" entire swaths of the book (like anti-highlighting!) so they can re-read and skip things and whatnot.

[jordangreywolf.livejournal.com]

I could go with a bowdlerizing option ... but for music, rather than books, and therein lies a certain technical difficulty. With books, I can pretty easily skip over the "naughty bits." I do not like getting fish-slapped in the face with an unexpected bit of profanity when reading something that has otherwise been unobjectionable ... but I could just as easily be subjected to a strangely SPECIFIC (and perhaps even painful-sounding and generally unpleasant) sex scene, and I don't imagine how you could auto-bowdlerize that short of employing an artificial intelligence. If the book has expletives or other crude material with such frequency that I would seriously wish to have a computer auto-bowdlerize it for me, odds are I'm going to have enough other problems with the story that it won't be worth my while.

With music, however, there have been a couple of cases where I picked up an album of otherwise pretty decent music, and then, out of nowhere, it's the "F-bomb." For some people, I am sure that this is no trouble whatsoever. In my workplace, where I more-or-less have to transcribe what people are saying, sometimes I have to type in such "naughty words" (and at other times I am directed to edit those bits out -- depending upon the client's preferences and the intent of the project in question), so there's a certain point where I just have to get over it. However, this is not something I want stuck in my head on auto-loop, and it's a bit impractical to just dip the volume when I know the singer's about to shout an expletive in an otherwise expletive-free song -- or album. (What was the point of that, anyway?)

As for your hypothetical apps: Auto-censoring based on content? There's a big difference between something that does a search-replace on a catalog of "naughty words," and something that can actually figure out that this character of this gender is engaged romantically with a character of this same gender, and -- oh my, we'll have none of that! (Rewrite story.) Iiiii ... really have no idea how in the world an app could even DO that, unless we get to the point where computers are so intelligent we can just have them create content for us (a la the amazing ability in Star Trek for the holodeck to create realized characters and environments based on the least bit of direction from an operator) and yet somehow not cause us to worry that we're going to be replaced by our new AI overlords. (Hmm. Maybe there's a REASON behind all those holodeck malfunctions....)

In other words, if we get to the point where a computer can make decisions on the general contents of a book and "auto-censor" it, beyond mere search-and-strike on individual keywords, you're probably going to have a lot more on your mind to worry about than the ethics of school boards or booksellers in shielding us from whatever thoughts are considered inappropriate for general consumption in that day and age.