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

[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.