What happened?

As reported by the Future of Music Coalition, it seems that AT&T censored anti-Bush lyrics sung by Pearl Jam front man, Eddie Vedder during their recent "blue room" webcast from Lollapolooza.

Read Pearl Jam's Press Release on the issue here.

Wired has also dug up other instances of censorship at AT&T, including Tom Petty, the Nightwatchmen, and others, at other webcast music festivals.

AT&T admitted to the censorship, but said it has to censor foul language. Strangely, this report suggests otherwise:

"AT&T originally said that it only edits Blue Room Webcasts for profanity since the site is available to all age groups. But a group calling itself the Future of Music Coalition, counted 20 instances of curse words being used during the Pearl Jam Webcast that were not censored by the content monitor."

So, AT&T seems to think that cursing is NOT profanity, since it was allowed, but saying "George Bush, leave this world alone!" IS profanity, because it was censored.

Got that?

Why is this a problem?

The analogy would be the power company shutting off your power because you were using it to run your skilsaw to make "Anti Bush" signs for your frontyard. Or, the phone company shutting down your voice every time you tried to tell your parents what a blithering idiot George Bush is.

For a country that was founded on freedom of speech, this kind of activity is worse than simply unacceptable. We simply cannot allow people to censor the speech of others simply because they have the power to do so; that is beyond Unconstitutional. Any company that would edit out Anti-Bush comments during a webcast would also disable access to websites/blogs/news/etc.. of any content they did not agree with.

If we allow this, then we might just as well burn the Constitution of the United States of America, and let the Anarchy begin. Personally, I'm fine with either way, but I think most people would prefer we all just follow the rules, since it has gotten us quite far with few internal wars.

What can you do about it?

Well, your options here are limited.

1. Storm the White House, take the Constitution of the United States, and burn it. Unfortunately, if AT&T provides the webcast, no one will see it, so your Anarchy will be pretty limited.


2. Storm AT&T, take the CEO's underwear, and burn them (while he is still wearing them). Post the video to YouTube. This will show people that Americans won't put up with censorship.


3. Support the Future of Music Coalition, even if that means just subscribing to their free newsletter and passing along stories like this one, and make sure the word gets out there to people: Here is PROOF that the Man is keeping you down! Here is a CRIMINAL caught in the act! It's not just rumor, it's not just hear-say, and it's not an isolated incident. Anyone with an Internet connection can see this for themselves.


4. Resume your life of Quiet Desperation.


KTHXBYE,
-CZ

Labels: political, Politics