Censorship

Post Reply New Topic

Stick and stone may break your bones, but words may never hurt them.

There is no such thing as too much knowledge.

I see your argument here, but you forgot one important piece of the puzzle. That hypothetical screenwriter signed a binding contract forbidding her to do said things, whereas MattShizzle's point I believe was more along the lines of doing something out of work at an ordinary 9-5 job, such as cursing a co-worker out in public place off of the clock for instance.

Or having something on their blog or whatever. There was a local female prison guard was fired for being in Playboy - the union protested and an arbitrator made them hire her back though. I also think certain things shouldn't be allowed to be put in contracts - like those ones that anything one create while working for a company belongs to the company - even if it has nothing to do with the job.

2 words: public image. I agree with you wholeheartedly, but the fact of the matter is that too many companies care too damn much about people who whose opinions don't truly matter think.

I agree, the only time what someone does off the clock can be taken into account is if it affects what they do on the clock. Say a police officer belonged to the white knights (offshoot of the kkk) that impacts them on the clock because their crediablity is called into question and most likely act upon their racist feelings, therefore abusing there power.

My thoughts...

It's not really relevant what you are a fan of. There are a lot of things I am not a fan of that I would not seek to have censored. The point is that if they can be censored, so can you.



All information should be free and readily available.



This kind of censorship does happen. There is an argument to be made that "classified" information should be protected, but in my view, we should have no need for classified information, government should be absolutely transparent.

The trouble is not that there is the potential to release classified information that would give aid to the "enemy", the trouble is insisting on the need to have enemies in the first place.



There are a couple distinctions to be made here. First, "violent threats" can take a couple forms. "Fighting words" (an attempt to verbally initiate an altercation) or "inciting x" (inciting a riot, inciting genocide, etc), are illegal, but other forms that might be threatening, but are less immediate, would be considered legal. For instance, a poem about revolution, killing a cop, something like that, would be legal. However, reading that poem at a protest where a cop is subsequently beaten to death, that would likely be considered "inciting".



Well then you don't have freedom of speech. Freedom of speech is in place to protect the speech that we don't like. Freedom of the individual over the majority and all.



This is a completely different topic, but an interesting one nonetheless. With the rise of Web 2.0 with things like Facebook and Twitter, people are actively making their lives more public. This is a choice, and as such, I don't see that bosses should be disallowed from using this publicly free knowledge. So...don't have a facebook page, don't have a twitter account, or at least, if you do, don't post a picture of you partying the night before you call in sick (with a hangover).



There is an important distinction to be made here. This site is a public sidewalk in America (where you can say just about anything). This site is a business, with terms and conditions that we all agreed to when we registered our accounts. The moderators have every right to censor anything they want (as they were given their mod powers by those that own/run the site and have the final say).



This is also not an issue of censorship, as the scriptwriter almost certainly signed some sort of non-disclosure agreement and is thus legally bound to keeping future scripts a secret.



There should be absolutely no restrictions for blogs.



She has a strong lawsuit if she has those intentions. Again, not censorship.



I don't agree with this at all. You don't HAVE to sign the contract, you don't HAVE to work for this company. If you don't like the deal, don't agree to it.



As much as I despise any racist group, I don't agree with this. If a cop has racist tendencies, that is fine, so long as they do not act on those racist tendencies through their role as a police officer. Only once the officer has acted on these racist tendencies should they be terminated.

That's stupid. Corporations should not have any right over anything I make outside of working hours. That's equivilent to modern-day serfdom. What if all or most corporations decided to adopt this for their contracts? Regarding the current economic climate, I wouldn't be surprised. In that case, it would end up being corporate extortionism (surrender all your property to us or starve to death). Individual rights should supercede those of corporations.

If you don't like the civil rights argument about this, then there's also an economic argument to be made. Say some engineering firm dictates that everything made by their workers belongs to them. What if one of them has a great new idea that would be a tremendous technological innovation? Well, no way in hell they'll write it down, since their power-hungry bosses will steal it and take all the credit. Way to go! You've destroyed innovation!

I don't think that's right either - there should definitely be laws regarding what companies can put in their contracts. Being able to work should be considered a right, not a priveledge. I also still think that if a website wants to be able to be accessed in the US it should have a minimum ammount of freedom of speech. I'm against letting businesses run however they want - I think the government should tell every business exactly how they can run.

I think if a company fires someone for what they have on the web they shoul be taken over by the government with no compensation to the owners (and whoever made the firing decision sent for 20 years to a prison that makes Guatanamo look like club med - ie daily beatings, rotten food, no toilets, never allowed out of cells, etc.)

Although democratic governments give their citizens basic rights businesses within these cultures exercise totalitarian cultures with very little question. They can determine dress, speech, behaviors to control their employees pretty much absolutely. The excuse is that people can always quit their jobs and seek work elsewhere if they find the business too overbearing but that is a totally false possibility when most people are vitally dependent upon their jobs for sustenance and many other necessary functions such as health care. If anything is created by an employee on off hours based on the knowledge and experience gained at work the business may have a legitimate claim to at least part of the value of the innovation but to claim unrelated creativity is a totalitarian exercise.

That's not stupid, that's just contracts. You may think the content of the contract is stupid, but the contract itself...well...it's just a contract. You can either sign it or not.

You make a bunch of arguments against this sort of contract, which is fine, and I tend to agree that this sort of contract is kind of messed up, but it's just a contract. It's not a YOU HAVE TO DO THIS OR WE WILL SEND YOU TO JAIL. It's your option to sign it or not.